I think part of the reason is that the forum headers are not always relevant. I have seen some examples where the original topic was left stranded somewhere on page 1 while an extremely interesting, but not necessarily on-topic discussion carried on from page 2 onwards. I think a good solution to this would be the newbie forum, with a selection of posts covering the common questions moved or copied into it, and with the non-relevant posts removed from the thread to make things easier.
Just my thoughts on getting the answers to the searchers.
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