Of course, if all you want is to get answers without participating in enriching the knowledge base, then you must pay for the points that you aren't earning.
All I want to do is see what the link I received from Google or a co-worker is about. Yet one tries to mislead me, and the other plain doesn't work.
I'm more than willing to "give back" to sites and communities that don't play stupid games and waste my time. And CodeProject, Stack Overflow, and countless other newsgroups, forums, and Q&A sites manage to pull this off without trying to trick or guilt-trip their users...
The day EE no longer shows up in search results will be a day to rejoice.