I once had an interesting experience when visiting Apple. I was telling a DTS engineer about a gnarly bug in the Cocoa text system I had found (certain text editing sequences would silently corrupt the undo stack; user might not notice until they accidentally did a select-all and delete, and then tried to undo to get their novel back).

I never got any feedback on this bug at all (just like always).

But, this Apple guy looked up the bug on their internal radar tool (a native Mac app, not some crappy web interface). There were screens full of discussion, with engineer's names I recognized, and the bug has been elevated to "Show-Stopper" status, which he told me meant the next release wouldn't ship without a fix.

What I took from this is that Apple's internal tools for bug triage, discussion, and prioritization are relatively sophisticated and heavily used, but they have nothing to do with the pathetic, rude, uninformative Radar interface that we peons who pay Apple for the privilege of developing for their platform get to see. It was kind of interesting to get a peek inside from their perspective.

Having said that, though, I almost never file Radar issues anymore, for exactly the same reason that I don't go to Apple's offices and clean their toilets for free.