Fair enough. But from personal experience I can say that Itch loses a lot for not having this ability to privately communicate between creators/sellers, to form friendly and working relationships.
I can only compare it to DeviantArt -- which is an art gallery site, but it features both private messages and a forum, encouraging collaboration between artists.
In the old days, there were a lot of creative community sites like this: Elfwood, DeviantArt, Voice Acting Alliance... They all had private messaging, as well as forums and comments. You could contact any fellow creator on the site (on DA, the only surviving one of these big three, you still can), and help each other and form creative working relationships. I see Itch as such a site/community, too.
I understand the current restraints, I just think Itch is losing something valuable because of those restraints. Everyone is kept isolated from each other, and doing things for themselves. This limits level of creativity and creative production on the platform. But that's just my two cents. I understand what you're saying. Ultimately, it's up to the management to decide if it's worth upscaling or not, and what they want the user experience and community to be like.
Viewing post in Feature Request: Private Messages
Oh, it could be different, if there were certain infra structure elements. Mostly multiplayer and a unified client. Look at Steam for a feature list.
As for da, well, uhm. how do I say this
They do sport that scaling mechanic I believe is the main reason for itch to not have that feature. The more people use the social media feature, the more money comes in.