The primary purpose is not usually a list of known defects and many ‘bugs’ are not actually bugs but feature requests or misunderstandings from users (e.g. RFC disallows the data you want my html parser to allow).
IME there are separate mechanisms to track feature work, bug trackers are for... bugs.
> or misunderstandings from users (e.g. RFC disallows the data you want my html parser to allow).
Again, this is a class of bug report that nobody is arguing should stay open.