I would not dream of making any comment on a thread unless I had taken the trouble to read the whole thing from the beginning
That's an interesting comment.
For P p r u n e it is probably correct, in that reading through the threads before posting is usually worth doing, and few threads run to a great length (the AF447 one was a different case entirely...). For Flyer it is probably a sub optimal strategy because they get very long threads in which few people bother to write more than 1 line.
Going back to searching, it is perhaps suprising that most people don't know how to do that effectively. There is a definite knack to it. It comes back to google, and it is usually much more effective to search forums
using google than by using the forum's own search function! And google has a whole pile of its own tricks.