Hi Brynn,

I'm a bit late to the party but as the one who set the "bloated" version let me explain how it came to life.

First of all you already noted that giving support for Inkscape can be tiring. Now I guess with your background in the forums you are used to people not giving any information at all and slowly getting there - that's one of the jobs we have the forums for after all.
Here in the bugtracker however I feel we *need* to be more efficient. A bug report lacking information is a "dead" bug report that is unlikely to ever be looked at. That is not only frustrating to the reporter (they certainly wasted their time) but also makes bug triaging much more complicated for everybody else (wasting a lot more resources down the road).
As we don't have enough resources for bug triaging right now (let alone fixing) the least we can do is to strive for reports that are as good as possible from the start, to keep the workload per bug as small as possible.

Now
- after asking the zillionth time for Inkscape version, OS, and steps
  to reproduce I decided we probably need to improve something
- the possibilities Launchpad gives us are limited, so I had to do
  with what little we get for the time being.
- in my first iteration there was only text
  (no warning symbols, "IMPORTANT" or whatever)
  Result: only slight increase in "good" reports
- therefore in my second iteration I added one "IMPORTANT"
  and the warning symbols (a little less than the cut down version
  you highlighted and Mc set now)
  Result: People started to *begin* noting the information
  I guess roughly half of the reports were "good"
- It was obvious the quality of reports improved, but I still had
  the feeling many people did not really read it at all (as I doubt
  anybody would omit information on purpose if they had read it).
  So I thought about *why* people still missed it and I concluded
  it had to be the Launchpad layout that kept drawing people's
  attention directly to the "Submit bug report" button
- therefore in my third iteration I bloated the informational text
  vertically to push the button down and out of view on purpose.
  Also I "experimented" with a new passage of text explaining
  *why* that information is so important to make people understand
  our motives - nobody likes being told what to do without explanation.
  Result: In my subjective perception after this change - although I fully
  admit it was "a bit much" thre majority of bug reports started to
  include at least Inkscape version and OS. Often also sample files.
  Steps to reproduce was still problematic, but that's nothing we
  can solve overnight I guess...

So in conclusion I still think bloating this text makes sense.
If others feel it's "too much" I'd prefer if we tried to optimize the wording and appearance to sound less "impatient" while still conveying the message.

One thing I thought about was to put a link to a page that has more information. I found [1], unfortunately it turns out that page does not have a lot of easily understandable information on how to write a "good bug report" but directly dives into the technical details of using gdb (and therefore is completely unusable IMHO - especially as those instructions are impossible to follow on Windows where our largest user-base is and likely unsuitable for the average user anyway).

[1] https://inkscape.org/contribute/report-bugs/