Yeah, please try again. The problem with a lot of Connect programs is that they were tied to a specific release (MonkeyManager Pro 2008) so bugs that didn't make the cut for the product release just got lost in space (not picked up for MonkeyManager Pro 2010). Part of the reason was that there were always internal bug tracking systems, which was what the dev team was really working from day to day, and these other systems were just inputs to that.
If you look at any of the projects that are on GitHub now, the public issues list is the issues list. You can see all the dev comments, scheduling via labels, pull requests, code reviews, etc.
https://github.com/aspnet/mvc/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclose...
https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Ac...
For products that aren't on GitHub, public issue lists like UserVoice have still been a big improvement (in my opinion) because they usually keep the bugs / issues / feedback around until it's fixed, and the votes accumulate so the important issues keep bubbling up.