One better way would be to have polls on the rockbox site on these issues, with questions such as "Do you have the 'Follow playlist' option set to yes? no?". Having a Wiki page for suggestions would be another, since several users could express their wills before they're turned into a poll
I think that in the appropriate situation, polls can be a better indication of user preferences or expectations than discussions on the forum or mailing list. One example that comes to mind is the issue or whether the selector should be an inverse bar or an arrow. When the arrow was eliminated to recover some code space, there was some very vocal opposition on the forum. I conducted a poll of what selector people actually used: http://www.misticriver.net/showthread.php?t=28157 (Note: this poll was conducted on the Mistic River site, but I also posted a link to it on the Rockbox forum.) As it turns out, the opposition to elimination of the arrow selector came from a small (less than 10% of over 100 respondents) but very vocal minority. I think that Linus or Daniel ultimately decided to restore the arrow selector as an option, but to make the inverse bar the default. Had that decision been made based only on the comments posted on the forum--which tended to come from the disgruntled minority rather than the happy majority--they would have reached the wrong decision about what the real user preference was.
I don't think that every single decision requires a vote of the users. But in situations where the question is one of user preferences or user ergonomics, polls can be useful.
