Yeah, I've always said I think readers who don't write have a warped view of how much feedback we actually get and what it means to us. Obviously now you can see exactly how many reviews a story has on AC, but before AC, there was no way to know. I remember when I first started posting my stories, I was lucky to get one piece of feedback in a month, but I still thought that the "popular writers" of the stories I was reading had to be getting so much feedback that an email from me wouldn't even matter to them. It was only once I started really talking to other writers that I realized that probably wasn't the case.
Then again, most of the "popular writers" I do remember emailing with feedback, I never heard back from. So... who knows, maybe they were getting too many emails to reply to, or maybe they just didn't care enough to reply. LOL See?! Whether it's true or not, that's the vibe you give off when you don't reply.