Typically when I want to bring attention to an older bug or feature request, I place a bounty on it (example 1, example 2).
But since the development team is probably the only ones who can provide an answer, I'm not sure if that's a very effective method.
Does the SE dev team watch the bounty board on a weekly basis to see what feature-requests or bugs get bountied? Or do we simply have to rely on the post getting enough attention that someone brings the topic to the dev team's attention?
Edit in response to Closed-As-Duplicate message
Thank you PM 77-1 for pointing out this question, which asked the same thing about 3 years ago when the Bounty system was first created, however I am looking for a more current answer than that post.
The accepted answer there was posted by Jeff himself, and he said
I'll try to make sure I at least answer the featured questions on meta.
This may have been possible in the early days of MSO and the bounty system, however this does not appear to be the case today, as I have placed and seen a lot of bounties on bugs and feature-requests that have not been answered.
I am looking for a more up-to-date answer by an authoritative source, and think that the substantial changes in Stack Exchange and MSO over the past three years should qualify for this question to be a different one from the linked question.