OP, you have a more-than-valid point here.  There are countless topics that have been allowed to live for far too long.

One of the first things that drove me nuts about bitcointalk was that 1) Duplicate answers would be given in a thread, because 2) No one reads replies past the first one or two in a thread.

This thread is one of the worst I'd ever seen: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1097068.0

OP was asking whether there was any interest in cupcakes for bitcoin.  After a while it was clear that OP had disappeared and that further posts giving the same replies was idiotic.  If you read this thread, you'll see how many times I begged the mods to lock it.  But it's still not fucking locked.  And I don't think the mods care much about locking threads.  More traffic, more profit for bitcointalk.