The cost/benefit framing makes sense for an individual ticket, but it breaks down at the portfolio level. The developers filing detailed, reproducible bug reports are your highest-quality signal — they've done half the diagnostic work already. The verification dance disproportionately discourages exactly those people, because they're busy and they know their time has value.

The developers who keep jumping through hoops are often less technically sophisticated users who click "yes I reproduced it" without actually testing. So you end up with a feedback channel optimized for closing tickets, not for surfacing real problems. High-signal reporters get filtered out, low-signal confirmations pile up.

The Chromium team gets this right by assigning someone to reproduce reports before asking the filer to do anything. More expensive upfront, but the signal quality is far better and the developers who actually know what they're talking about don't give up after the first round of pushback.