I used to have monthly voice chats with Will and sometimes Brett (I miss him!) and others sometimes, but this has dried up completely. Even when it was happening I knew that I was in a very privileged position and that most players don't have that kind of access. Frontier's communication is already poor and so I see nothing to lose in asking for better engagement.
I think this is one of the big difficulties for "communication" and "engagement".
There's a few hundred thousand semi-regular players of the game, with communities in tens of countries, languages, timezones and cultures. A lot of those communities don't overlap very much at all and may not even be aware of each other - witness the disbelief from a lot of english-language communities when EG Pilots won the Dangerous Games, because they just weren't aware how many Russians played Elite Dangerous (and indeed the long-standing fandom there going back to the original Elite)
Without knowing the exact terms of contract, but assuming a 260-day working year and an 8-hour working day, this gives us each a "fair share" of about 30 seconds of community staff attention per staff member per year. (Which is not just for talking to us, but also processing that, turning it into a form that the rest of the company can use as input, etc.).
So Frontier have a dilemma - try to spread that attention as much as possible across the entire player base, which leads to a very impersonal communications strategy and complaints such as this one, and even relatively large player-created events including hundreds of players being basically ignored by Frontier - or provide more focused attention to selected "community leaders" and "content creators", which as seen on this thread and elsewhere leads to accusations of favouritism and complaints that "these people don't represent me"
I think it's fair to say that Frontier have - partly as an inevitability from the community growing substantially between the 1.0 release and today, and partly as a deliberate choice - moved towards the impersonal/dispersed approach rather than the personal/representative approach.
