I've noticed that too. It did seem more difficult to really connect with the devs as far as making our own contributions, though they've always been very responsive to technical support types of issues. I honestly think it's simply that temperament wise, the NEM developers aren't really people or relationship oriented. They're very focused on coding and the technology and being personable and engaging is a whole other skill set.
Lol. It's called division of responsibilities and delegation.
If you go back in the NEM time machine, you'll find that the core developers were much more active earlier on in the project before the first "Marketing Lead" (xtester) was brought on. It was an intentional decision to separate into two teams - development and marketing - at that time. With that separation in place, there was less need for the core developers to directly engage in marketing activities. Nonetheless, any technical people who wanted to join the project could reach out to us.
As time went on, the division became starker and became far more formalized around two years ago. The development team partnered with TB to begin catapult development. The marketing team evolved into the NEM foundation and focused on NEM1 marketing.
You can disagree on the effectiveness of this approach, but it's a bit unfair to claim the developers are not personable. This is all by design. Building catapult from scratch requires a LOT of effort and focus and some insulation was needed to hasten development.
