Wow! A huge amount of discussion on this. My two cents as a new user and new Hatt owner:

1. The forum is absolutely an invaluable resource of information
2. I do not think the search function is robust enough. I have had battery problems recently and the search engine won't let me search for things like 8D or Group 31. Even when it does return results with other terms, there are far too many irrelevant hits.
3. Many of the frequent users are here multiple times a day, and I can understand why they like the forum the way it is because they have the pulse of it in their head. For the newbie or infrequent user, I don't think it works as well. That seems to be the root of the debate; frequent vs infrequent user. Who is the forum for?
4. I think we need to at least try to post more things to the FAQ section. I would have loved to see a "Everything about Batteries" section instead of sifting through hundreds of posts when entering the search term "batteries." There are 2 threads I found that could go there now.

Just some suggestions to help others following my path.