As a current level of newb and close to four hours of reading my conclusions are this:  Everything that is trying to be prevented is still occurring. Posts such as "this is my 5th post" are not helpful and only extend a thread when people are looking for information. The four hours to me is neither here nor there as I am new to mining and trying to get as accurate information as possible.

So what is the fix you ask? I'll be honest and say that there isn't one simply because getting people to agree on anything is a challenge.  If you lower the 5 post 4 hour minimum then people will whine about the amount of spam by newbs or anyone else for that matter. If you leave it intact you continue to get people posting (whining) that they have to make 5 posts and read for four hours for the topic of all five of their initial posts. This thread contains some really good proposals for how to solve the problem but then the other human factor rears it's ugly head and it's called human laziness. No one wants to invest the effort to implement the fix so it will continue to spiral.