My point exactly, the longer you've been ABLE to participate is a distinct and obvious advantage to those that were born earlier.

Here you are wrong, dear brother trippledubs:

Lets assume that BrowserUk is a male inhabitant of the UK, born 1965. So he has a life-expectancy of ~76 years, in which he can shine as a monk. This span is reduced further by the fact that perlmonks wasn't invented before he was 34 - so he has only ~42 years to provide all his insight to the monastery.

Let's then look at you ... and lets guess that you were born in 1995 - so you life-expectancy is probably 3 years higher. Furthermore you didn't have to wait that long for the doors of the monastery to open - you could already join it with 17, giving you 20 more years of monkhod than BrowserUk.

So all you have to do is to write as many valuable nodes as he does, day by day. And then you can be sure that your time will come, and you will reach levels of wisdom (and XP) that leave us old ones far behind.

Be patient and don't give up - time is on your side!

TGIF, Rata