Offering a non-developer friendly suggestion platform
Currently when something is wrong (from the perspective of a single user) it is hard (IMHO) to engage the Gnome developers.
The way to raise that "issue" is by creating a new issue in the Gnome bug tracker (formerly Bugzilla). However it happens that a single user's request gets closee, ignored or triggers an endless and frustrating discussions. Offering possible solutions to the reported issues may also trigger a response like "that may confuse the user", without providing any reasonable explanation for this assumption.
I think it would be great if Gnome would offer some kind of "suggestion box". Allowing an easy process to make suggestions or ask for new features or a change of existing behavior. But without the need for the user to understand which Gnome component this actually is, or what GitLab is and which groups are relevant.
Secondly all users should have the ability to up-vote a proposed topic. Without anyone from the Gnome developer community to comment that this is a bad proposal or may confuse other users. Let the users vote for their issues, make it easy for users to share the issue on social media in order to gain more feedback.
After an issue has reached a certain threshold of up-votes, the Gnome developers which work on components close to the issue, should response with a qualified response. Maybe explaining the backgrounds, offering a plan how to get there or solve the issue in a future release or in another way.
I think that the up-voting, the threshold and providing a qualified response will ensure that people also invest some time in writing up good suggestions. And that would also be an indicator to the Gnome developers of what is important for users.