Bug Reporting, is it really broken?

Again yesterday I was listening to a podcast when the two podcaster talking about bug reporting and how it is broken in terms of does it really work. It was funny because I had the same experience that this podcaster had, he submitted a bug report and the answer to the report was "sorry thats to hard fix" when the podcaster replied that answer was not good enough the developer that had that case replied back, "the souce code is open, fix it yourself." I had submitted a bug report once, because I couldn't get Adobe Flash to install on Firefox. My reponse that I received was, "don't submit bugs like this, search the database first and fill out the form completely," and I had filled out the form completely. the developer was very rude and it made give up on submitting bugs. I don't need to put with something like that, especially when all I was doing was trying to help.

I am a not programmer, so I can't fix these bugs. I also wanted to give back to the linux community in some way, and I also heard that by submitting bugs I am doing my part. I then get shuned for doing the very thing that I was asked to do. Even though I have not submitted a bug report since I am not going to give up on it completely, I will be very careful now with what I submit and how I submit it. Now my question is, has the bug reporting system grown so big that the developers feel overwhelmed? Is this system really broken in conceptual design? Can we as a community correct this system so that when Linux becomes more widely accepted a regular user won't get treated in the same manner?

I think bug reporting systems are great for the Linux community because they allow developers to find out directly from the users what is broken and then they can fix it. Unlike the Windows bug reporting software that doesn't mean anything, this should and the users should be treated with a little bit of respect and tolerence. I am sure that many bug that do get reported probably shouldn't be, but don't go and degrade someone for not knowing any better, this could be a huge turn off for Linux.