Yeah. I miss Nyx. It was a blessing to converse with her on my old account before the merger. We lost another one this month with the departure of Zoey. The lack of civility on the site remains discouraging yet it seems it is par for the course. I don't foresee a great deal of dev participation in the future with the current trajectory of the culture in the forum.
People dont know how to behave when developers are active on a thread, basically it creates 3 kinds of people,
(1) the ones that can behave and interact in a normal manner (they know how to be neutral, how to criticize or how to compliment),
(2) the crazy ones defending the developer not matter what and
(3) the crazy ones attacking the developer no matter what, and the last two will attack each other, the developer AND the ones who act normally too, and if the developer is a woman it will get even worse, i would not advise any female developers to come clean about their gender as it tend to create even more chaos.
And you can notice that when the developers leave for good the thread becomes more pacific and with less fights, i personally avoid to interact in threads where the developers are active...developers aint no saints either, but people here usually go too far.