Is there an appropriate channel to suggest improvements? I have just had to work through issues not directly related rancher but I feel the status messaging could have been less terrifying, if developers are open to hearing my story

Issue is probably the best place to request that. Note that status summary generation for the UI is already a very complicated subject.

I get that, the things that terrify me is when an agent is not checking back in it says its rectifying configuration even if no action has taken place, and it would be nice to see a more mild version of an update message when updating rancher-server saying that its purely updating the agent and nothing else I am happy to put the leg work to reproduce what we saw next week, also happy to be told these are bad ideas