Maybe the CN devs are among us, but my intuition sees them as unlikely to ever directly participate in plaintext discussion on the surface of the clearweb.
They claim to, on their own forum at the very least. I think someone has also posted here under the 'cryptonote' nick. They also emailed all (or at least some) of the various CN coin developers about the tree_hash bug. Again plaintext. Either they are not behaving as your intuition suggests or those discussions are fake.