The question would be: what about newbies that do put in such effort, but are simply more interested in advanced cryptocurrency aspects, maybe especially in the realm of smart contracts and this sort of stuff. They might be easily overlooked since most long-time visitors of the forum just ignore the Altcoin section due to the sheer amount of spam to sift through.
Even if they don't care about merits at all, they will have a hard time finding people to talk to when it comes to these technical subjects, because Altcoin spammers have no clue (nor interest) about those topics and technical Bitcoin people stay in the much better moderated Bitcoin sections.
Which definitely happens. It's much harder to strike up a decent conversation in the Altcoin section, than it is in somewhere like Development & Technical Discussion on the main Bitcoin section. This is because of two reasons; the altcoin section is somewhat boycotted, even though interesting discussion does happen, and in fact would benefit users Bitcoin knowledge, and be more aware of some of the issues Bitcoin might have, and what users are trying to implement to make alternatives better, which might in the future mean that Bitcoin implements something similar. This is a rare occurrence definitely, but I think it's because of the lack of involvement from most users.
Then, there's the second issue where generally speaking; the altcoin section attracts more lower quality users. That's not to say that all of them are though. That's something the moderation team needs to sort out, since most of the Altcoin section isn't getting reports, probably due to the first reason. It's boycotted. I'm hoping to get into the deep of this problem. However, at the moment we're kind of catching up on older posts made in 2017/2018. Most reports in the announcement section as an example, are from this period. I'd say 90% of reports made in those sections are on old reports.
I can't speak for other moderators, but once I feel like I'm getting a grasp on the announcement section, I'll be moving onto the other sections like Altcoin Discussion, which I've tested recently, and can report a ton of reports in a very short amount of time. So, that section is a behemoth of a task, but I'm sure we'll eventually be able to get on top of it.
I don't even want to look at the statistics of how many posts have been removed in the announcement sections, I can imagine it's well over 100k. I've easily removed hundreds of pages of spam this year alone, and I know mprep is very actively managing the section too, as well as some patrollers, and other global moderators.
Call me mad, but I genuinely believe we're starting to make an impact on that section, and given enough time I can't see why we can't get on top of the rest of the sub sections. I'm willing to put a ton of effort in to
reclaiming the altcoin section, however I'm not sure that the reputation it has will ever be forgotten, and it would continue to be boycotted regardless of how clean we get it.