Discord Permissions? Staff Blocking people from messaging them?

So I joined the discord channel a few days ago and sent the staff that were online a message requesting the Partner Role for myself, No answer...

Next day I message one of the staff again to see if it was possible, they're online and active and I get the bot response "Your message could not be delivered because you don't share a server with the recipient or you disabled direct messages on your shared server, recipient is only accepting direct messages from friends, or you were blocked by the recipient." Which would imply they blocked messages from myself or changed their setting so no-one could message them.

What's the point of having staff sitting on discord if they block / ignore messages?