Crothian said:
I think the big problem is posters won't let a serious discussion actually happen.
Actually, that's a symptom, not the problem itself. The problem is that on this topic, the site is not fulfilling it's original purpose.
The riducule comes from the fact that the topic has come up repeatedly, over and over, month after month, since the release of 3.5e. And the folks posting in a new thread haven't seen the old threads, or ignore them. So the information in them is ignored. And that means the same discussion, over and over, time and again.
And each time it comes up anew, someone else gets alarmed, someone else gets annoyed at WotC money-grubbing. Or if it isn't someone new, it's an old someone who gets alarmed or annoyed again.
End result, even without the ridicule, is threads serving no useful purpose, and aguably having undesireable effect. They are not creating new information, not exchanging new ideas, because with each new thread the same old information must be reiterated before new discussion can happen.
Thus, the site is not doing it's original job - informing people about the state of the game. If folks were informed (say, by reading the discussion in the old threads before starting new ones), most of the new ones wouldn't need to be made, and folks wouldn't be getting annoyed.