Trust me, I'm not misunderstanding you.
You skipped the key inescapable step of your format, which is the
scrolling thru all the messages and reading of all those messages.
For example, one guy
just posted 11 of messages in a row prior to my last one. On my laptop, I can see about 1 or 1 1/2 of each at a time onscreen. You have to read each one individually to know what the topic of each one is. That's not to even mention all the people who posted prior to that in the time since I last visited. That's
a lot of reading and scrolling through irrelevant stuff for anyone to do, whether they're new here or not.
If all those posts were under topics, it'd be easy to skip all that reading and scrolling, just choose the topics you want to read. (And not like "Massage" -- the topics should have titles that the person posting the first message creates. From your replies, I can't tell if you understood that idea I mentioned earlier.)
In terms of scrolling -- With my way, 10-15 topics titles can be seen onscreen at once. You can bypass all the posts you have no interest in. For a person visiting every day or 2, there would rarely be any scrolling to do at all through these topics. There would rarely be more new topics or ones with new posts than would fit on one screen. You wouldn't need to 'search' for a topic -- it would be right there looking back at you the moment the page loaded. Instant. Zero work.
And no, this wouldn't help just people looking for info, but anyone who comes here who doesn't personally know the regulars. Basically, the public. To put it another way, is there anything in the last 100 posts here that someone coming here other than the regulars would have any interest in reading? And even if there is, what % of those 100 are chat and inside jokes?
So I'm not just talking about 'info' -- I think any kind of interesting discussion in general is discouraged by this single rolling thread format.
Anyway, please don't take any of this personally. It's not intended to be. Just healthy debate. I mean, chances are pretty low of getting a new format instituted, we both know that. Tho I don't agree with your conclusions, it's good and interesting to hear your thoughts.