all this info is ultimately buried in tons of different threads of varying age and quality. Because of this people are either forced to rediscover stuff, get old outdated info, wrong info, or just never find the info despite it existing. And the "rediscovery" is particularly bad because it leads to this mini drama of peoples' previous hard work going unacknowledged.
You're absolutely right that finding info on this forum is a real problem. the search here is notoriously useless and where most of the site isn't publicly viewable that means you can't use google to search it either. I've been fairly vocal about this problem with the site myself over the years.
As for this particular thread and the comment of mine that you quoted. I was mostly frustrated NOT because OP had not known about the other resource, but because he DID know about that resource before making this thread (he was pointed to it in another thread). I was questioning why he decided to create a new separate island of information rather than contributing to, and enriching the existing resource that I and others had built.
I don't know why people don't just contribute this kind of info to the Arcade Otaku wiki
I can't speak for others but my own reasoning is two-fold.
1. I've been contributing to technical forums, wikis, and other sites for the better part of 20 years, and I've seen years worth of work disappear when someone who owns a website loses interest and stop maintaining it. And I'm not talking little flash-in-the-pan sites, I mean big sites with 10s of thousands of users that dominate their topic, slowly lose members as people move on to other things until one day the site is just gone because someone didn't think it was worth keeping up the maintenance.
So I still contribute but now I also keep copies of everything on my own sites where I can guarantee that doesn't happen. Hence why that spreadsheet is on google docs and not on AO or here on AP, and should google Docs go away I have backups.
2. A few years back I had corrected some technical info that someone posted (based on my own research) and they informed me that they got their info from the AO wiki and encouraged me to update the wiki to be more accurate since I had done a lot of research into that particular hardware. So I went on the AO wiki and fixed some of the egregiously wrong things. And when I went back the next day my changed has been reverted and I received some nasty message from another member telling me that was HIS page to maintain and I shouldn't have changed it without his permission.
That's fine that people want to be quality assurance for wikis and monitor them to ensure people aren't mucking them up, but there are better ways to handle that than acting like someone is attacking your little fiefdom. So I haven't contributed since because I've got better things to do than fight with people who don't want my help.
As for this particular information on the AO Wiki, I would question if it would even be allowed. Essentially we're talking about Bootleg NAOMI games and IIRC AO doesn't allow discussion of such topics
