When a thread like this gets to be 14 pages long (or more), does anyone actually read EVERY post or do people just read the last few and feel the need to chime in?
Not on here they don't. A few hundred posts is apparently too many to read to become informed. Given the relatively short life-span of most things Bitcoin, I guess there's no need to develop a long attention span.
I read them all.
I have been watching this thread since it started, so I come back every so often and read all the new posts.
If I come across a long thread that I have not watched from the beginning, I typically read the whole first page and the whole last page, sometimes a couple pages back from the end to get more context for the current discusion.