I've pm Ed the op of locked threads before, why can't people do that?
You make it sound like a thread is the only response as people can only answer questions thst way but why would that be?
Of course you can PM the OP but in that case the discussion becomes private instead of public. Valuable information that could be posted in the thread is now sent over PM and other users can't learn from it or understand how to solve the same kind of problem ultimately leading to them opening a similar thread asking the same thing.