They want to offer a stable, good locking, free (as in freedom) and well integrated operative system. To get this, they have written their HIGs (i guess this is what you could call "simplify user interfaces") and their own framework Granite ("simplify application development"). The closest thing you can find to a roadmap is their blueprints page on Launchpad (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/elementaryos)

This forum is not the official forum, since Elementary doesn't have one. While some devs browse it, they mostly use irc and mailing lists.

They took down the answer service because it was dedicated to Elementary OS Jupiter, and they've stopped to support it some time ago (http://elementaryos.org/journal/farewell-jupiter). They're probably going to bring it up again soon, but if i recall right they wanted first to do a refresh of their whole site.