When we mentioned the desire to automate this, so we could automatically deploy eg nightly builds, MS sounded like that was an interesting idea they hadn’t heard of before. WTF.

When you receive a request for a feature that you know would be good, but for whatever reason you can’t implement it (perhaps there are other things you need to pay more attention to, or perhaps there’s an idiot manager establishing dumb priorities), giving the response you received is one of the least anger-inducing ones. It’s likely they’ve been repeatedly asked to make the process less painful, but whoever is in charge of managing devs doesn’t care.