Absolutely, the forums are very useful particularly at beta time. But they aren't the best or only way to share information. I think Apple could still open up things a bit more here to help developers without harming themselves. There are no real secrets once millions of developers have the betas anyway.

I'd love to see them open up more around bug reports too, there's a lot of mystery and guesswork due to the closed nature of Radar. (Not to mention all the duplicated effort in Open Radar that tries to compensate.)