SO is useless for serious questions since
1) It is not easy to answer them and get some karma fast.
2) To answer tough question you have to discuss. Discussions are not the format of SO. Every question which can not be answered in a YES/NO/USE THIS SNIPPET is getting downvoted.
The whole format "This is not a forum" is ill by design.
This was a very tough issue SO helped me to solve. I used a comment someone left to help me start my own research and create the code snippet I needed. I then asked someone for a indepth description on why my snippet worked and what was really going on.
While I don't use SO as much as my early coding days, I still feel it's very helpful.
I would've solved it differently (probably in Code).
I'm not sure if contractors hanging around there but I had a great experience on dba exchange and got some really really helpful answers. I always tought that I should get deeper into SQL after seeing such answers.
The whole format "This is not a forum" is ill by design.