as i mentioned already, the team leads run their projects as they want. The majority of projects do not release betas (in fact we used to explicitly ban it), but a few such as forums, events and store do. We are investigating offering access to items such as changesets/nightly builds, but historically we have only released builds through the project tracker, which allows for them to be tested independantly for localisation, quality, xhtml, security etc., so I imagine this will be trialled with one or two projects rather than make a switch.
Regarding your issue about forum involvement, I'd love it if each project team had people who followed up on all posts in their forums as this minimises frustration(i know some of them such as blogs have people like Dario who have an impressive post rate).
As for making it easy, why not just log any enhancement requests, bug issues, suggested code at the public forum @ support.dotnetnuke.com, this is open to all (simply create a login so you can track the status of your issue)
Cathal