@that girl again -I wasn't around when the Ideas forum started, but I do know that when I was working up feature lists for 2.7 and 2.8, we went through the Ideas forum. It was also the basis for the survey on the dev blog about which features people felt were highest priority. The Ideas forum as it currently exists isn't the best guide, because unless people are voting on all the potential features, rankings are deceptive. We'll be working on how to fix the idea submission/ranking process in the next couple of months while we build out the opportunities for community involvement other than contributing code patches.