Is that via this forum, via the product's Help menu or both?
Redman, if I understood you correctly, you said:
What experience do others have of contacting the developers direct (just curious)?
Direct contact is through email, IM, phone call, etc.
My experience is very good through email. But, in fact, I do not send them that many emails. Only that the communication is always opened, you can always talk with them.
About help files, ok, can be improved a little but I think that avast is talking almost 20 languages nowadays. It's a little slow and requires very hard work of a lot of users to get all files updated