Wrong assumption, It is a developers and users chat and not a dev only chat. Unlike other projects we have resisted the urge to separate the chat into dev and user chatrooms. Atleast I remember when some other person suggested it I was vehemently opposed to it. So that is your wrong assumption.
Again you are assuming. Some of the devs are coding for Krita since long long time. How can you say you are using Krita more than they spent time of coding it since there are devs who have worked on krita since before it became anything production ready. The maintainer has worked on it since it was just a front end to imagemagick a command line utility.
And here you are saying your voice is next to nothing has anyone from the team specifically said this? Or is this just your assumption. Even if it is an assumption do you suggest that there should be a person who will listen to user demand and start working on it right away? Do you know any proprietary or Free software project that does this?
Krita developers have open and public chatroom, open and public forum, and open and public mailing list, there are meeting held on each Monday again open and public. If these are not opportunities to voice your concerns I do not know what we need more.
Now if your complaint is that devs should listen to a new user coming to chat and suggesting or giving advice on first day of joining about the direction of the project then I believe you yourself know that it is not right. After all there is a maintainer to the Krita project to do that.
Here let me give you my own example, I was a new krita user in 2014, I switched from windows to linux, it was new for me. But I stuck to the chat and I started contributing, wherever I can, I began to respond to user queries, started being in the community, I asked questions in the chatroom, I got answers for them however foolish they might be. I even have bug reports which date back to 2014 or 2018. I do not feel neglected. I know this is how Free software works. My voice is not neglected too, developers do listen to my complaints. Not just in Krita this is true for other KDE projects. Recently I am testing graphic tablet settings panel under wayland (linux display protocol), I had made the bug report about it here even if it is irritating for me (you can check my post history and rant about wayland) I make my point and leave the dev to take it or leave it. It is slow but it is heard and acted upon. I am not a developer by the way.
So I believe you can join in the team too, it will take time but you will need patience. If more people need certain things it will surely get implemented. Yes I won’t get what I specifically want implemented that would be very presumptuous of me to expect special treatment to my request. After all it is the developers who code not me.
P.S. There are two or three examples given here in this thread of developers listening to user requests if it is possible to implement quickly. you yourself say that @dkazakov and @tiar helped you, I don’t understand then how your voice is not heard. Do you need more developers listening to you?