alt Hacker NewsEngineers from Apple would and do respond to some of the more technical questions here and there. Lots of great knowledge buried in their haystack. However, I generally agree that this used to be a more trustworthy resource back when forums were the Internet
I'm not even sure it was useful back then. So many answers to threads were just non-answers like "you can't do that" or "there is no fix."
It was easy to find people with the exact same problem as me, but getting the problem solved was often hopeless.
In some ways, community forums for such a highly obfuscated operating system are somewhat useless, because the answer is always "hopefully Apple notices this and fixes it."