In fairness, I think that being able to give people a tangible example of how the reporting process could be better might be helpful in getting city staff to the table to improve the system. There may also be city staff that _want_ to improve the usability of the reporting forms, but that need some public pressure to be able to push back, e.g. on parts of the current forms that meet the needs of the City legal department, but do a poor job of serving citizens.
Using the 311 email as the API for a community-built issue reporting app may be clunky, but it's really the only option if you want to demo something that works, since there's no way (at least that I'm aware of) to request for your app to plug into 311 directly.
I remember seeing at a recent U of T School of Cities talk that the transportation department also finds the requirement to report things by address to be frustrating. It makes it harder for citizens to report problems, and it also makes it harder for them to find, triage, and fix the infrastructure that is broken.
