I had wondered for the longest time why obviously great posts (or even innocuous ones) were shown as having been reported then I noticed someone finally said they would report so the devs or mods or whoever would take notice.
I think this is an indication of two problems.
1) The report feature is not being utilized for what it was intended, which means posts that really should be reported are not receiving as much attention or appropriate action due to the increased volume of reported posts whose nature does not actually warrant reporting.
2) The community feels as if they are for the most part ignored unless some kind of misconduct takes place, I also think this is one of the reasons for so much lashing out/multiple posts/all caps posts/profanity etc. When there is an issue causing distress a lot of level headed stuff seems to get ignored, people get frustrated and stop caring and lash out.
I think both of these problems are important and deserve attention.
A possible solution to the first problem might be to first clarify exactly what happens when a post is reported (I doubt blues look at reported posts, more likely forum moderators behind the scenes handle it). It also might be beneficial to limit the number of posts a person can report in one day.
The second issue I think is even more important. I know the blues have said that they read a lot of forum threads regardless of length but what people want to see is some kind of evidence that the thread was in fact viewed. Given the speed of the forum I find it hard to believe threads consistently at the top of the page do not receive more attention than a thread with a few posts 10 pages back.
Even if blues simply posted "we have read and will take into consideration what you've said" or a simple "we hear you" I think it would satisfy people a great deal more than they are now. Even some kind of icon next to the thread to indicate it was viewed by a blue might soothe a few souls.
I hope this post was constructive.