By releasing a patch (with or without notes) they improve the user experience. Frontier have fewer issues, and the users have fewer problems. That's a clear gain.
No. I expect users to continue to play the game. If they have *specific* issues that stop them from playing, then it would be in their interests to give it a go and see if something has improved.
I think it's neither right nor wrong. Those users don't have a *right* to know when their particular bug has been fixed, but I can see that in some situations (e.g. persistent crashing) it would be helpful for them to be told.
The problem is that there isn't necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between a change to the code and a reported issue. Sometimes issues that are reported are fixed just in due course (e.g. someone might be doing a code review, spot and fix an issue; in this case there's no link between that change and however many bugs that were reported). Sometimes a fix for one issue will also fix others. And sometimes issues will be fixed because of the information directly from a bug report -- now, I would argue that in these instances there *could* be some feedback. Even when there *is* linkage, it still requires someone to manually go through and update all of those threads, and that's more time consuming than you would think (and yes, I know this because I've spent many a day writing up release notes for customers).
The ideal situation is to have a bug reporting interface that links directly with Frontier's internal issue tracking. But again you still wouldn't get direct feedback in all instances, and it still requires people to maintain it full-time. There's very little return on a bug tracker like this -- in the worst case, its absence makes a few very vocal people annoyed, but it has very little general effect as the vast majority have little interest in patch notes if they don't contain functional changes.
