Dan runs an excellent site, his patience is enviable, his search function is very helpful.

I think the real issue is a "cohort" of users has passed through phases of wide eyed newbie, arrogant "expert", humble "wisdom", to bored cantankery (new word?).

Coffee is a lens to explore our existing habits and pleasure centres. It reveals who we are in the way we approach it. Once we've reified our life habits through the lens of coffee, we probably need to move on to do it again somewhere else... unless coffee has somehow opened our eyes to new habits. I don't see a love of coffee so much as a love of how coffee reinforces an individual's sense of self worth through expertise, prissiness, pontificating, or mindless dribbling (this post).

A real community of practice documents, tests and professionalizes. There are elements here, but there's still a lot of mythology and some dusty experiments that get used to defend a particular conclusion rather than open a door to replication and study of nuance. Results can also be tied to value judgments about what wave of coffee is "correct".

I don't think the problem is newbies or laziness. I think the issue is a lack of a path forward for the cantankerous level of user... where to next? Dan appoints a few as mods. I don't know what else makes sense. Every domain has the same challenge.

I teach grad students. It's very easy to get disappointed. But changing my lens to one of asking how to create a more effective and engaging learning experience, and measuring my progress against their behaviour, has certainly kept things interesting. I ask less why they don't do what they should, and I ask more of what structures and role models shape the behaviour that doesn't make sense, and how I can change it.