If it's a waste of people's time to think about Perl and type their thoughts, then why is it here? Just because the twit didn't have a genuine need doesn't mean that the question itself has no value to the community as a whole, nor the outsider who searches.

Searching perlmonks directly is rarely the avenue a newcomer takes. They've never heard of perlmonks until they google for "perl matching balanced text" and gotten a couple hits here. And as you say, searching is harder than it should be; more ways to phrase a solution is more ways to find it with a global deep search like google, et al. How do you measure the number of people who find their answers and leave satisfied without ever signing up or replying to a node?