I've been a lurker on the list for a good long while now, and recently I have become pretty active. I think a lot of the pro's post, and the problem isn't that the people are banished to newbie.dev.nul (I like that by the way.), but that the people that originally asked the question endlessly debate the advice that gets posted by people that really know what they're talking about. This causes a great deal of frustration, and it's how the endless loops in threads end up happening
I've noticed that alot of the advise given is appropriate for larger, i.e. tier 1, setups but isn't necessarily as useful for tier 2/3/N+1. Things that work great in large scale might be unweildy or not even feasable on a smaller scale and vice-versa. North American Network Operators aren't necessarily just tier 1's... This might be one of the causes of "energetic" discussion when one tier answers what makes sense for its scale but another tier is puzzled why anyone would ever consider such an approach. To avoid confusion in the future it might be helpful for both questioner's and answerers to mention what scale their addressing in the question/answer. Just a suggestion, -Rob