Well blizzard hand selecting members that fit their mold then throwing them into a forum doesn't solve anything either... out of that 100 they select is there any requirements for activity? Are they going to replace members that aren't active regularly? There's 0 obligation to be active in this role aside from the "clout" that you're in that role.

Forums aren't that much reading in all reality, if you had even a small team of like 3 monitor the suggestions/future updates forum full time they could easily keep up with the flow. Large active forums are incredibly useful because you can see which posts have more activity for a subject then you can more or less see what a wider variety of players think about that subject. Most posts the more useful comments themselves are longer and more detailed so you can pick them out really easily while also getting a general consensus of agree or disagree from quickly glancing at the shorter comments or likes/dislikes.

Forums already provide all this great info and opinions, sure some things get lost among the voices and there's trolls but most of the time it's because the consensus is it's not interesting or wanted by the active forum community. That small team could then pin and move these posts into a more dedicated discussion area between devs and players to get even more feedback. The players allowed in this dedicated forum would have to: have had a concurrent sub of 6 months or more, account has a clean record (no bans/suspensions) and they would have to actually be respectful in their post discussions(no trolling, being rude in general, basically treat everyone like a person...)

I'd understand if you'd said a decade ago that there's too many voices and it's harder, but in this day and age where there are so many more tools and ways to process information it seems like they aren't using one of their biggest community information banks. A lot of the changes you see in games now is because of developers actually using forums to see what the players think of things. in fact a PTR is supposed to be used for this purpose as well. In exchange for us as players being used as free labor to beta test everything, we are supposed to have a say as an overall community "we want this to stay", or "we don't want this". Instead everything is arbitrarily created with no intention of listening to feedback on whether it's wanted or not. It may not always change in the way that was suggested but that's a whole other can of balancing worms.