Is it valid to ask if or when a request tagged as under review or planned a long time ago will be implemented, or for its current progress?

Question

Quite a bit of the time, many bugs I run into or feature requests I come up with have already been asked about on the site. These prior requests have received a positive response from a staff member, i.e. a response that the team has brought up the issue for internal review or intends to implement the request (specifically, being tagged status-review or status-planned).

Whenever someone asks about such a request, the general community policy is to close the question as a duplicate of the original request. However, this can seem a bit disheartening, as it gives off a "we'll get to it when we get to it" aura. Also, considering that such closures are generally done by the community, it can give off the impression that it denies staff members of the ability to see that others have the same request or are experiencing the same problem.

As well, there have been examples in the past where the team has decided internally to not implement the request even after the initial positive response (example), but they've forgotten to update the meta post to indicate so, which serves to falsely lead people on (whereas if they knew it had been declined, they could accept that or file a substantive reconsideration request).

The tag description for status-planned says that a reason why an approved request may be left as planned is that there are other projects that are higher priority. Another similar case where I've seen the tag used is if it cannot be implemented until some other bug or feature is implemented before it.

In any case, one may want to know the current progress of a planned request or one that's under review, want a timeline as to when it'll be implemented, or want to be made aware of any other projects blocking the implementation. Or, they may simply want to know if the team still intends to implement the request or that the request hasn't been forgotten about since when it was tagged as planned or under review.

I asked this type of question in the past once, and the reception was extremely negative. In that case, though, it was likely because the original report was only a couple months into being tagged as planned and that the report in question was fairly minor. (To be clear, I don't wish to re-litigate the question.)

Is it valid to ask a question of the forms noted above? Are such questions considered to be within the guidelines of this site? If so, when is it not too early to ask such a question, and what types of original requests should such questions be reserved for? In many cases, recent activity is what ultimately gets attention for such older requests, and one may not be able to properly bump the original report (through a substantive edit, a substantive answer providing additional arguments for implementation, or a bounty).

Answer 1

as it gives off a "we'll get to it when we get to it" aura.

But that's exactly what it is: they will actually get to it when they will get to it.

Stack Exchange has internal list of all the bugs and feature requests tagged as status-review, as much I know for certain. However, they can't possibly know how long it's going to take to actually fix/implement each item in the list without spending precious time on digging into it, and that's a time they correctly (IMO) prefer to spend on other things.

So what happens is, there is a list, maybe even with internal priority and ETA for when each item will be checked, but they just can't estimate how long it would take: might be few minutes, might be few weeks, and might be technically impossible. So when a developer gets to handle an item from the list, they will know more details and post proper updates, but this can't really be done in advance for all the items.