You get what you pay for. To find the useful information among the pile of what you call pedantry and nitpicking you have to not take any of it personally and n

You get what you pay for. To find the useful information among the pile of what you call pedantry and nitpicking you have to not take any of it personally and not assume motivations of the people who post answers. Skip over the non-responsive and off-topic replies, and remember that someone took the time to respond at all, for free, and may have simply misunderstood the question or answered it from a different frame of reference than yours. Consider that many questions posted in online help forums don't seem to have much clarity or effort to express the problem. Many questions already have answers, which makes those who do try to answer wonder why the questioner didn't search first. When asking strangers for free help online you don't have the right to demand anyone conform to your definition of useful. You don't get to set the terms. If you want to set the terms and get only helpful answers you will have to pay experts.