certainly there must be some better secret society/inner circle chat somewhere?
Of course there are such places:
Delving Bitcoin:
https://delvingbitcoin.org/Mailing list:
https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/However, the more inner circles are of course more moderated, and then, it is normal to see your post rejected, because of being "not good enough".
Also, if you wonder, why Bitcoin Core developers are not writing here that much, then there is quite simple answer to that: they moved somewhere else.
I have my AIs to talk to and fortunately they're smarter than 80 ... maybe 90 ... percent of what's crawling around here
Because this place is not for smart things: the main purpose of its existence is just entertainment. And it is a pure consequence of trying to be censorship-resistant: if anyone can write anything, without the fear of being rejected, for example because of the low quality of the content, and with every spammy post being constantly snapshotted by a lot of external crawlers, then everything is brought down to the lowest common denominator of the average user.