I'm quite new and just stumbled across this topic.
IMHO a huge benefit would be to have a dedicated list of features with their states (e.g. "in consideration", "planned", "being worked on", "rejected", "done") linking to forum posts where the feature is being discussed. This could act as an entrypoint for users that want an overview whether their missing feature of choice is already mentioned somewhere (so they can vote on, describe why they need it, post workarounds and so on), or if they should propose it. This does not have to involve any kind of voting, though.
Consider my current use-case as an example. I just found out that Affinity products seem not to support embedded fonts in PDF. I searched this forum and found some discussions. But is this being worked on or do I need a permanent workaround? Do I really have to aggregate the information spread across different (sometimes dated) threads on my own? I'm not a pro user, so I don't even get all the abbreviations and terms. If I had this kind of list, I could
see that it really is a missing feature and not a bug or layer 8 issue
silently follow the progress of its discussion / implementation process
have a dedicated place to discuss workarounds / solutions for it