My experience has been the exact opposite, if the developers understand what the business is trying to accomplish and what the incentives are then they are in a much better position to prioritize and build the right thing. Every single time I’ve seen 6 months of work on a useless or low value feature it has been the result of the dev team getting requests via some PM telephone game.
This is a tricky balance. Developers can also get overwhelmed with requests for estimates, automation tasks, etc etc, and get annoyed that people have so much contact with them. But it is a tricky balance; there's no obvious solution.
Sometimes it's helpful to have some division of labor between field/sales/support engineers who go to handhold customers, understand their particular problems, and prototype fixes, and "product engineers" who have less customer interaction. This is somewhat similar to the SRE/SWE split at places like Google.
If I were designing an organization with such a division of labor, those wouldn't be different job descriptions but different activities within a single job description; maybe I'd spend 22 days a month doing product-engineer stuff like adding features, and 3 days a month doing support-engineer stuff like visiting customer sites, diagnosing customer problems, and answering calls, while maybe hatchnyc would prefer to spend 22 days a month doing support-engineer stuff and 3 days a month doing product-engineer stuff. The reason is that, doing either activity, you gain an enormous amount of knowledge that's crucial to the other activity, but very difficult to even put into words, much less into a knowledge base.
