Would there be a forum where users can request developers to create some portlet? I thought the regular portal forum would have been sufficient but most posts there are just questions and answers and it's difficult to dig out actual request to a developer.

Yeah, another good suggestion - ideally this would allow people to vote up/down ideas, and then an aspiring developer only has to choose the top-most voted idea to implement. In the meantime, we could add a forum category specifically for this, but it wouldn't have a vote ability. We could also use something like Google Moderator.