I have been on both sides of the divide; the lowest rank and the highest and I can understand why lower ranked members can view the retorts of higher ranked members as standoffish and also how higher ranked members would see posts from lower ranked as insincere or made to bait others for merits.
Its a vicious cycle. When you sign up on this forum, your probably pretty new to Bitcoin, and with that excitement you can't wait to post, and because you lack the experience at that point in time, with the old forum system, and Bitcoin your probably going to say a lot of things which shows that you are inexperienced, but not only that Bitcointalk is probably one of the best forums in terms of the posting standards set by the community, and the guidelines so new users might not understand why asking a question that's been asked a million times or why their reply was reported, and deleted.
Then the older users after time become more experienced, and they've seen the same types of questions, and start to find it tedious. So, what might be an innocent question, becomes
spam to those that are experienced, yet a couple of years ago they would have seen that as normal. There's a sort of elitism that comes with higher ranks, and its just a unfortunate part of life in almost every department, you'll see that elitism creep in. However, we've got to understand that newbies are generally quite eager to get involved in Bitcoin, and I do think we are a little hostile at times, and sometimes its probably warranted. Finding the in between is probably pretty hard for most users. I understand from both perspectives.
We know that users who want to earn merit, try to create threads because its more exposure, and that might lead to more merits. Like I said though previously, while it probably does still apply, I believe the merit coverage these days means that replies get just as much attention.
I have that feeling as well but I also have a perfectly good explanation for it based on my own example. When I am opening a thread that post usually takes much more time and effort from me than a reply on someone else topic which results in longer and hopefully more valuable post to the community as whole. Or in other case I am running a gambling pool or something and OP is like the default place for people to recognize my efforts throughout the entire thread which lasts for whole year or even longer.
This is probably the case for most users. I remember how long it took me to get the "Reporting Effectively" thread up, and how long that took. Although, I think partly that was because of the way it was set out, and it being a guide rather than personal opinion so there was a lot of research that went into that. Replies, most people do off the cuff, rather than cite research etc. There are definitely exceptions to that though.