I agree, and I've been observing this for years. It's now becoming a generational problem - younger programmers know and understand PR model, they don't want to deal with mailing threads and patches. These days, young people are like: "You sent me what? an email? Are you joking?" People shouldn't be catering for the comfort of the maintainers, no matter how arguably mailing threads are techologically more superior, it should be the opposite.