unclear apport actions

I agree with the above. I'm trying to be a good citizen and testing out Gutsy Tribes and Beta releases. Every so often apport tells me it has info to send but after that the process gets pretty opaque.

My issue is that I assume the crash logs should be useful even if I do nothing else, but (as far as I can tell) they only actually get stored if I create a new bug. Other people sometimes appear to have found the exact same bug and added their crash logs, but they have often been closed because the reporter hasn't bothered to add any more detail.

I do have the ability to add more detail (which may not be the case for most users), but to be honest 9 times out of 10, if the information gathered automatically isn't enough on it's own, then I'm not going to bother sending it in at all.

I've experienced a few other crash reporting tools and most seem to just take the data. I assume they can apply some kind of statistical analysis to see what is often reported and common causes without requiring extra info.

Perhaps this is all as intended, but it seems surprising to me based on previous experience with crash reporters.

I agree. After upgrading from 11.10 to 12.04, Unity crashed and apport opened a window asking me if I wanted to send a crash report to Ubuntu developers. I clicked 'yes', and a Firefox window opened at Launchpad.net (all the rest is known for who has sent crash reports to this site).
However, since that day to date, Ubuntu has experimented a few 'internal errors' on my machine, and when I confirm that I want to send the report, apport apparently closes and does nothing.