It'd be a little easier to identify key requests if they implemented voting to solve the "+1" comments, as identified in the "Dear Github" letter.

Yes and no. Some feature requests were years old and hugely popular. For example, displaying tab-spaces code (such as Go) properly was something that took years to implement, despite the enormous feature request thread and extremely simple implementation. It became obvious github had dedicated zero resources to building new features the community had longed-for