Most people aren't born into the hobby of audio.
We all had to start from something, somewhere.
People without experience in hi-end audio invariably start by asking funny questions and making arbitrary choices.
It is a good sign, because it means hi-end is drawing new blood in, instead of dying out.
Take me for example, the first time I went into an hi-fi store, an Usher storefront in Taiwan (now you can see their speakers winning audio-magazine awards at CES), I asked why there is no equalizer in their demo system. Yeah, that was pretty dumb, but at least I knew equalizers existed.
Those Usher speakers are great bang-for-buck for their prices in Taiwan (about half of their MSRP in US).
I ended up owning a pair of their cheapest bookshelf speakers and amplifier, and it blew away a several-times-more-expensive Kenwood system my parents bought. That's how I started my hi-fi journey.
When I first auditioned K501 and HD580 at their respective dealers in Taiwan, I used my Kenwood PCDP to drive them. Only K501 can be driven by my PCDP, so I bought it over HD580 (hilarious, wasn't it?). If head-fi had existed back then, I sure would have gotten better advices.
When I first came to head-fi I got bitterly attacked in my first (or second?) post for recommending a DAC in a CD player advice thread. I did not realize people looking for CD players weren't considering DAC and vice versa.
You see, even after nearly 1000 pretty serious and sincere posts about audio stuff on head-fi, I am probably still saying pretty stupid things in the eyes of the truly learned. But I feel I have learned a lot, and made my system much closer to my ideal.
Since head-fi's discussions of components invariably rank high in Google search results, more and more audio newbies are going to flood head-fi. Maybe we can have a "for-newbie" section, or we may not need one--I don't know. But head-fi should pride itself in being a portal to the wonderful world of hi-end audio. Without head-fi, how are audio novices, regardless of age, going to discover what headphones can really do, and get honest, non-arrogant and non-ignorant opinions about other components like DAC, CD players, tweaks and so much more?