Bug Reports: Ignore them and they'll go away?

Max Threshold writes: I've been using F/OSS for about a decade, and though I'm not much of a software developer, I pride myself on contributing what I can in the form of clear, concise bug reports. Over the years, I've started to notice a disturbing trend among higher-profile F/OSS projects: a tendency to reduce their open bug counts by brushing things under the rug. I've seen the severity of bugs that could potentially damage hardware arbitrarily downgraded to 'minor', and even seen confirmed bug reports closed without a fix because the users who originally reported them stopped using the software and did not bump them after a release... only to be reopened later when someone else came along to report the same issue.

Do others perceive this as a problem? And if so, what solutions would you offer?