Staff are too distant from the community

tl;dr: yes, but with different methods than what you're suggesting as they'd be more effective.

Agreed, this is definitely an area for improvement.

We're currently working on addressing this by reworking Brawl News. The next edition is going to contain information about our plans for each gamemode. They are not announcements as we don't know for sure if we will be following through with these plans, but this will be made very clear on the thread.

We need to formalise complaints and idea suggestion because right now, it's really flawed. I think we should add a "Complaints" sub-forum where people can complain about whatever they like, and there should be a requirement to get a response from staff. Our existing ideas sub-forums should be treated the same way. I will bring this up in staff chat when I get the time, and if all goes well I will try and get this implemented.

I don't think this will be the best way to address the issue. We don't have regular discussions on "should we change xyz or not". When we first work on planning an update, staff bring up different things that they think should be changed and it's discussed which changes should be prioritised for the update. Then there's discussion on how exactly these changes would be implemented. Then there's also a lot of waiting for us to get dev time (or for devs to work on the update), and then there's testing and discussing the results of this testing. This is not a rigid process; this is just typically how we plan updates. Because of all this, a biweekly thread about what's been discussed in the mod chats won't contain the stuff you'll want it to contain.

As well as this, there's no official Brawl stance on most things. Every staff member has different opinions on what is fine and what isn't, so the thread would be saying "We discussed assassin. Some of us thinks it should be changed, some of us don't." We could always get the thoughts of just the server manager, but this would be unrepresentative of what others on the staff team think.

The best way of being more transparent about what staff think about certain issues would be formalising idea suggestion, as I outlined above. By requiring at least one staff member to respond to every thread (and getting staff members to respond to threads more frequently), it'd be far clearer on what our thoughts on everything would be.

The best way of being more transparent about what we're currently working on and discussing would be by reworking Brawl News, also outlined above.

I also think it would be worth doing more Q&As with staff teams of large gamemodes (i.e CTF and WarZ) and SMod+. Having regular, monthly Q&As would be far better.

The only things staff members are required to keep secret about are things that are only in staff chat. Staff members are definitely able to say what they think of certain ideas or certain aspects of gameplay, and there isn't anything in any protocol saying otherwise.

100% agreed. We used to have a Development Log sub-forum which did exactly as you said it did, but we deleted it for some reason. Will also bring this up when I get the time.