Personally, though, I've yet to see anything of the current features as a non-premium account that make me disapointed to even use a regular account rather than a regular one. As it stands, I don't even know what a premium account brings right now nor I have seen many making a fuss about regular accounts yet having too little features or premiums too many in comparison.
I mean, I still already have folders and folders options. I still have search tags filtering. I still can browse for -journals- to see what people says on the site as a whole rather than just my watch list, something I've never seen elsewhere even on Deviantart(but then I rarely go there anymore). And I'm not talking about the design and usefulness of the status page such as when there was a DDOS attack on the site a while back and it was very nicely and rapidly documented in near real time one post after another until the attack was resolved in a matter of hours.

Regarding bug/feature report I guess it has less to do with "reacting only to influx of users" more than there weren't users to think of making requests in those directions before these influx. As in general the crew are indeed -very- open to suggestions or answering questions(especially on their twitters), which responsiveness is often in fact one of the site's current strong point So I figure it was less of a "wouldn't bother to add it unless asked" and more a case of "Hey, we didn't think of that. That's a great suggestion" which in my opinion just show again one of their strong point in how responsive they are to people and how fast they can implement their suggestions.

I dont understand what you mean. Almost everyone has a gold service these days for paid members. it just helps fund the site. And anyway if you dont like it no one's making you use it. The whole site's pretty lovely without it IMHO