David speaks the truth, and his answer is spot-on. If you want an answer from Microsoft directly, you have to pay for it. This is still largely a community forum.
However, I strongly agree that it would be useful to restructure the forum to get "burning questions" answered. Particularly if they are relevant to many askers. I've made
a suggestion recently that might help surface questions to the right answerers. You can upvote such suggestions to show support. And for now, upvoting questions that others have asked may be your only tool, apart from asking your own well articulated
question.
But your dream that Microsoft will take the most asked, most difficult, most unanswered community questions and provide answers for them may remain a dream.
That's because there's money to be made in engineering support so there will be internal conflict about whether or not to have paid specialists giving that service away for free. It depends on whether people see it as a necessary supplement to Microsoft's
other products and services. It's a tricky business decision to decide where to draw that line. For example, Microsoft is fine to run this community forum and let MSFT people lurk about. But it doesn't seem to be a priority to answer questions.
As with any business partnership, if you're giving something away, you expect to see it return in some form. And it takes guts to spend money to earn a good reputation alone, trusting that it will bolster your business. For now, you just
have to trust that Microsoft will identify burning issues, if it seems like the community is missing information about how to resolve a particular issue, and will provide support in some form or another.
Read blogs, watch Channel9, use TechNet, scour the forums and make good use of search.
