The best place to request new features/report bugs will always be the public issue tracker @ support.dotnetnuke.com. Items in the forums tend to get "lost" due to the amount of forum posts - in addition raising issues via gemini allows you to track them and see what version(s) they're fixed in.
Note: I think forums are a great way to debate items such as UI - as theres no definitive "right" answer to something as subjective as UI, then a healthy debate in the forums is a good way for us to get a feel for a community consensus. Theres little doubt that any changes to UI will not meet everyone's preferences, but a forum thread with constructive debate is a good way for us to hopefully see what should provide most value to most users.
One of the benefits of opensource is the "many-eyes" mentality, where many people provide feedback/testing (including non-coders), allowing those with source code access the chance to make the changes and benefit everyone, however I highly recommend you use gemini, as otherwise some of this effort will be lost. Any additional information such as detailed reproduction steps or details of the fixes required to code, are gratefully recevied.
Note: as to Alex's comment, it could certainly be read as being overly harsh, but that's the nature of text based communications such as email/sms/forums - it's not a good medium in that misinterpretation/misunderstanding happens easily. I'm sure Alex didn't mean it in the way it's been interpreted. For those who haven't been around the community for long, Alex was once "famously" the biggest complainer on the dotnetnuke.com forums (I hope he doesn't mind me saying that), and we similarly requested him to use gemini and also threw out a challenge to him asking if he was so concerned would he step up and help. He took this in the spirit it was meant, not interpreting it as a "go-away" comment, and became part of the QA team, and nowadays is an invaluable resource, effecting change from within . He spends a huge amount of time in the forums and gemini, frequently triaging bugs and alerting us to major issues - forcing additional issues to be added to bugfixes and complaining voluably when we don't have zero-defect releases, acting as a community "champion". We're all very glad of his contribution and would love others to help out similarly, using the established channels such as gemini.
Cathal