One unpopular stance I have is that their management has the blame in a lot of what is happening: They define the goals, prioritize the resources and measure the accomplishments.

We rarely see their top management come in here to address concerns, provide status on issues, and provide any sort of plan for the future. We never see any sort of feedback loop (polls that ask "would you like to see A or B" where we can see the results). It just seems like everything goes into a blackhole.

There were some large concerns about gaps:
How come bug reports are not making it to the correct Devs?
How come old bugs get put back into the code during updates?
Why are settings "forgotten" during reboots?
What the heck is happening in the middle of the night causing poor performance?
How come there isn't a true known issues / WAI (poor KommunityKobold)?
How come bugs reported on Lama (and Mournlands) are ignored - not saying they have to be patched, but they are not even acknowledged until numerous players complain about them?

You raise good points/questions here.

Let me address the first and last ones, because they are effectively the same and the most frustrating to all involved.

The devs (and that includes me) have been puzzled why we'd release an update only to learn of disappointment that bug x had not been addressed, or to find that bug y was discovered on Lamannia and reported, yet we were unaware. something was very wrong. Recently we learned why.

For some amount of time (especially since the influx of players when we launched F2P), bugs reported from players had not been getting to the devs in a timely manner (or in some cases, not at all). They have not been lost, but rather have been accumulating at a pace that overwhelmed our QA staff. Not a good situation.

The QA team has since expanded in size and are diving into this bucket. They are faced with the unenviable job of validating each bug (you can imagine the quality of bug reports varies greatly) and the dev team is now receiving them. Our first challenge is identifying & prioritizing the most important bugs so that we can turn this situation around as quickly as possible.

We also need to keep the known issues list updated in hopes of avoiding duplicate bug reports that essentially slow down the QA process. Three or four reports of the same bug can be helpful, 50 reports of the same bug wastes a lot of time.

As for old bugs being re-introduced in a subsequent update, the reason this happens is purely human error. When we get close to an update, we 'branch off' a version of the game that is tested and readied for deployment to the live servers. When we find and fix a bug during that time, we must do so in both copies of the game. If we fail to do this properly, the bug is fixed for the current update, but not for the subsequent one. Things can get very hectic during this period and regrettably mistakes happen.

Setting lost when server reboots: I think this has only happened once (although I could be wrong). The DDO servers have multiple settings. Most are permanent and aren't affected by reboot, but recently we experimented with some temporary ones; the idea being that they would be made permament if we were 'happy' with them and I think that we had an issue with communication between departments (which we've hopefully rectified).

I'm just hoping it isn't a case of "Good Cop, Bad Cop" to keep players from jetting.

Honestly, I think most, probably all, of the Turbine developers take pride in their work and want to make things right.  The dysfunction comes from the communication and management channels.

Agreed.

Mad's posts have always been different than the standard Turbine lines.  He tells it like he sees it.

i would wager that someone up top went to tell the bug team that their priority is to make this game good one and to start by fixing it. this someone probably also gave mad the authority to say stuff he deems fit

Which is probably why he so rarely posts. I believe. Keeper mentioned devs possibly getting fired for saying the 'wrong' thing. I hope Mad avoids this, and see a slight correlation between his better posts and periods of abscence (granted it also correlates with the community trying to blue ball him for things he isn't responsible for as well, and the whole correlation isn't causation rule blah blah blah)

Madfloyd:

I want to have his babies.

I like him rather a lot. He has always been civil to us, and actually seems to enjoy posting to us, rather than treat it like throwing bread to the plebs.