I think the ER/SR system for SolidWorks is weak for several reasons. One of these (for SR's) is having to go through your VAR. Since that's never going to change, I'd like to focus on ER's here.

Believe it or not, ER's *do* get implemented. Yes, you will pay years of subscription to see the result, but it's better than nothing. I have had a few simple ones be implemented.

Here are the weaknesses in the current ER system:

1. Only subscribed users can submit them. Why? If you ship half-broken software anyway, why not let the largest user base possible contribute to your testing program? Even if you're going to insist on  not giving them the service packs, at least use them like you use those of us who pay.

2. Finding previously posted ER's is not trivial. There is little or not filtering; it seems ER's get "merged" only at the SPR level, and so it's easy to find duplicates. Also, some people write some pretty lazy ones that don't help anybody.

3. Voting is cumbersome to say the least. First, you have to actively go to the site and search. If you don't hit just the right keyword, you are never going to find something. It's not easy (or even possible?) to link to them, and even then, you'd have to go through the effort of "announcing" your ER to get people to vote on it. What this means is whatever little votes you're getting are probably meaningless.

4. Updates on the progress of the ER are pretty dismal. Sometimes I get an email and I read it over and over again to find anything that I didn't write in there, until finally I find the line that it just became some SPR. Mind you this is weeks, if not months, after the ER is submitted. What I've submitted for Simulation usually comes back a lot faster and with more detail.

So here's my proposal:

Make a forum section called "Feature Requests" (what an ER really is). Then:

1. Let anyone submit posts there. I think anyone can come onto the forum, right? So that's done.

2a. Searching in a forum is not too easy. In the end, the user is responsible for taking the time to search and read. I know sometimes it takes me a good 10 minutes, but I do my best not to double-post. However, the forum has the strength that it opens up ER's to discussions, and SolidWorks employees can join in the fun. This will eliminate vague, lazy ER's because there's people on this forum "itching" to have their say, and they won't let people get away with it.

2b. Use powerful forum users to your advantage. Take the top x posters and offer them "ER Moderator" positions. They are on this forum all day anyway. They could take care of some filtering by merging posts, for example, or demanding clarification from lazy posters. Many forums have user moderators.

3. Allow posts in this forum section to include polls. Boom. Voting done. Also, since it's a forum, there should be a framework in place for subscribing to the forum section, so people like us who are adamant about making this software better can monitor ER's and immediately join in discussing/voting for the ones that would be useful. It's much easier to "scan" through ERs and choose the ones to vote for than to have to go actively search for them. The Opera Forum has a good interface for this. Check out this post: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=593122. Some new guy describes what he wants, and then he can add a poll with a very simple question (so lazy people can just read that instead of the description). Immediately some heavy poster chimes in, and the discussion ensues. The poll system is not just a yes or no; you can have multiple answers and allow multiple selections ("which of the following features would you like" type of things).

4. Updates to the ER/SPR progress can be on the same thread. Perhaps once the SPR gets a number, that gets added to the thread title.

I think if there is more discussion, and an easier way to track these things (with a framework that already exists), you'll get a lot more feedback than you do now.