so, let's add a "board" level
I guess our philosophy is that we already have one -- it's called a message board. :)
Seriously, one of the major reasons we wanted to add staff is that the BBs actually read everything posted in BB Global, Suggestions, Bugs, and several other high-traffic forums ourselves, and the community has grown too large for us to both do that and develop without adding BBs. There are also ways that GMs can contact us more directly, and we use this as a high-priority way of identifying and fixing bugs. But, as much as possible, we'd like to hear what managers are telling us without going through the filter of GMs, or even worse, several filters (GMs, a board, then us, or something like that). One of the main reasons we hired Edju and Patrick is that they already had a track record of reading every post in a large number of forums and identifying the main problems we needed to tackle.
I realize that this does not work as well in languages that we don't speak, and that sometimes we do have to rely on GMs to bring things to our attention. We also get to use extra information that might not be available to GMs or individual managers. For example, there were several posts recently in Global (English) from Italian managers suggesting it is very difficult for promoted teams to compete in their new division. While anecdotal evidence supported the claim, we looked more widely at all promoted teams in Italy in seasons 9 and 10 and found this was not really the case.
I guess my point is that our philosophy has been to have as few layers as possible. Because we cannot read posts in many languages, GMs and LAs have become a necessary layer in some cases, although anybody who wants to post in the large, English-language forums will get their posts read. But, even though we give the GMs additional ways to reach us with urgent problems, that's not an ideal solution.
With regard to Italy specifically, we have been lucky in two other ways. While Italy is currently the second largest country in BB, there are several countries fairly close in size. It is therefore rare that a problem affects Italy without affecting several other countries. We have also been lucky that several Italian managers are quite vocal on the English-language message boards, so that those of us who barely know enough Italian to find the Italian -> English button on google translate often find out pretty quickly when there's a major discussion in BB Italia that we should be responding to.
As GM-B31 pointed out before,there's a big question about expressing our opinion in BB Global.In every field of the life,when you've to deal a very high competition,you succeed to improve your skills and your knowledge about that certain argument.Being our community one of the oldest,and one of the most competitive in the world,very often an Italian user have a best knowledge about what are the issues and concerns in this however fantastic game,than of many users who played in a less competitive scenario.So it's frustrating to see our opinions being ignored by some Gms(ofter also from the new promoted BBs),or pointed as the opinion of an "Italian squealer,who doesn't want that we're grow fastly so we can beat him".We have just fight harshly in our leagues to survive,should we see enormous advantages for very few users in the world,who also cried when someone notes that yet the best teams in country with very few users accumulated enormous advantages not only with the users of the greatest(in numbers of users)also compared to their compatriots?
It's a problem of being listening,because we want to make the game always better and better.