My time is valuable - especially my free time, which is when I am a able to browse Bitcointalk. I refuse to waste hours of that time searching through pages and pages of spam for the one or two comments that include an original or well-articulated though. As I mentioned before, finding threads early can sometimes lead to a good discussion over a couple of posts, but as soon as the spammers take over, I usually give up and remove the topic from my watchlist.
Unfortunately, its not going to get better without people reporting it. It doesn't mean that we are relying on you to report alone. More people in general need to be reporting. I'm a patroller, and I don't seem to get that many reports in the Bitcoin Discussion section. Maybe, there's not that many newbie spammers there, but I would think they are a big portion of it.
Unfortunately, reporting is not developed enough yet to be efficient.
It lacks one little but really important feature:
To check if a post has already been reported and it's waiting for the mods to decide.
If the forum could get this feature, we (

) could check much more posts, because there would be no parallel work for the reporters.
There's no need to report a post 2-3-5-10 times by different members, because a decent mod can act based on the post itself, even if the reportes is not describing the problem properly...