I would not make newbies wait 6 minutes between posts either because when you're new is when you have the most questions.
Newbies ask a ton of questions, though. They also spam "thanks" posts a lot to have a higher post cost even though
Activity is a better barometer of use. A good deal of information can be gleaned from just doing tons and tons of reading. I understand a lot of what you are saying, however, it does seem like a lot of users will post things like "Well, we all know BFL will never ship" without many users understanding why. There's a long history of activity, though, and one thing that really helped me was finding a few of the older members and just going through their post history. It's also interesting to actually read the general "Bitcoin Discussion" forum in reverse, starting from the first posts in 2010. You can do that here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=1.22840I'm not sure there's a perfect way to learn Bitcoin, but a lot of the newbies also don't seem to have a good grasp on the stuff listed in the FAQ on Bitcoin Myths:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MythsA lot of stuff is stickied for a reason, too. Doesn't seem to matter much, though.
Well the Activity barometer could be better...
for example i'm a very active Forum reader, not a writer. so if I spend much time reading for example the speculaton forum, the activity should go up, so if i write somethng, the reader should see, that i've spent much time in this forum since 2011.
now it's 18 days, 3 hours and 33 minutes. (if i had written every hour just one or two stupid comments, i'd be an hero member already...)
so IMO it makes more sense to make a combination of time online and posts (and somehow differentiate between subforums)