Yes, directly contacting Anvil would convey the message, but you don’t know who else is pushing for the same feature, and it would get messy when your priorities change. I also think that feature requests that are discussed by multiple users on the forum are better than described in an email by a single user.
I would like to be able to see what feature requests other users consider most important and to transfer my precious few Importants from one feature to another.
Anvil knows what users pay and how much, so they can assign different weight to the Importants of different users. Their final ranking would be different from what’s publicly visible, but nobody expects for them to literally follow the forum ranking anyway.
Perhaps they do keep an eye on the number of Likes, but it’s obvious that my 251 Likes are worth exactly zero, for the simple reason that they are 251! The signal to noise ratio is close to zero.
If I had only 10 Importants I would spread them across 3-4 requests that I really consider important, instead of diluting them across the universe of feature requests.
I have no way to test this, but I guess the histogram with the number of Likes on each request today is close to a triangle, where the number of likes goes from 0 to 20-ish almost linearly. And I guess that the histogram with the number of Importants would show 95% of the features with 0 Importants and just a few steeply pointing up, reaching values much higher than 20-ish. I myself wouldn’t Important most of my own requests, simply because I created way more than 10, but I would only Important 2 or 3 of them, plus 2 or 3 made by other users, and some of them would have more than one Important.