I think a lot people do/have figured out things from scratch. I know I have to on a regular basis troubleshoot a new problem or a one off problem that needs to be addressed. In some of these situations there isn't any documentation that can really help me fix the problem so I usually have to pull from other knowledge to find a fix for it. In some cases I have people to ask, but in those cases 99.9% of the time they are standing right next to me or are on chat. I'm not saying that this community shouldn't be used for finding help with problems, but I do feel there a certain amount of leg work needs to be done regardless of how much time you have. I look at it this way, and this isn't in direct relation to anything Jeff did it is just a general feeling about this stuff. If you send an email, and 30 people spend 2 minutes reading it, 1 man hour was spent just in reading it. If that is something that could be solved by a person spending even 15 minutes searching Google or whatever it might be, then I feel people's time was wasted. Sure it wasn't a lot of time, but say you add 5 replies that take a minute a piece and only 20 people read those, that is another 100 man minutes spent on the problem. So at that point 2.5 man hours have been spent on a problem that you could have solved in less time. If it is that important to you, 2.5 hours of your own time shouldn't be too much if you are willing to have 2.5 hours of other people's time spent on your problem.
I especially feel this way about email, the topics we discuss on this list are all public knowledge so they are available online. You don't need to talk to anyone about them in most cases, but with the possible delay in response that email brings, to me it makes even less sense to use a mailing list. Jumping on IRC or chat with someone from the list would be a must faster solution. If the topic was advanced and you needed to find someone with specialized knowledge than that would certainly be a different story. Sorry if this makes me sound like a jerk in anyway, I don't think myself or anyone else on the list really has a problem helping, we just want people to a respectable amount of time on their own problems.
