For almost all projects, using the forum is the best way to engage with us.
It means that there is a clearly written out proposal and plan and our team can route the project to the best person on the team to handle it.
Sending a private message in Telegram, Twitter, Email are all sub optimal ways to engage because those lack the full context and proposal and it makes 1 person (the person you message) the bottleneck.
I completely agree with you. On the forum, all participants are clearly visible, thanks to smart statistics, user activity and their interests are visible. But most importantly, project branches are visible and it is easy to see the history of publications and discussions in these branches. There are different language locales on the forum, which is very convenient for discussions.