In all fairness, a forum thread would collect a bunch of anecdata but is not an official way to request a sale.

If the Raspberri Pi foundation doesn't want to sell you their product, there's no way you can force them to sell you one. That there are no blog posts probably just means that some exec from Broadcom told Eben not to post anything.

what do you all expect from a company that markets as the most open platform that is full of closed firmware and NDAs?

Everything is a tradeoff. They get parts for cheap from certain manufacturers. Those have proprietary firmware that you and I can't have the source code to. Everything else is open source. For me, that's fine. It lets me buy them for much cheaper. You could probably design your own board and find completely open source hardware and software yourself, but I doubt if there's much profit in it. If you have a better path and can keep the board as cheap as it is then you should probably get in touch with their engineers.