[woah]

Well this is a feature if you are looking at SO as a place to get answers. There are far more people looking for answers (by asking OR searching) to the basic simple questions.

So if you leave a good answer on something basic and simple, you have provided utility to far more people than if you are leaving a detailed answer to an obscure question.

This, incidentally, is what's lacking in the IRC channels of open source projects. In an IRC channel, questions that are not hard enough get ignored because they are not interesting to the experts in the channel.

So the IRC channel is good if you are hacking on the core, while SO is good if you are just trying to get something done, and the technology in question is a small part of your entire stack.