Well, Kat, then you continue to have the problem of bifurcated discussions, and all the nastiness of people telling people to search, and all the repetition of people telling people how to search. And instead of ten discussions on "Quiet Land of Erin," you end up with 25 - and you have to check each one to get the information you want.
Maybe a better idea would be to transfer a request to the thread that provides at least a partial answer to the request.
As far as combining existing threads, you may be right - I'm not completely satisfied with my efforts at combining. I think it works better with short threads, than it does with long ones.
I'm all for preserving what's worthwhile in the Forum, in the form in which it was posted - but sometimes I wonder if it's worth it to keep all the requests that just get pointed to another thread.
-Joe Offer-