Chip,

While I respect the heck out of you, can I play devil's advocate?

- Is the WP website on StackExchange one popular because the support on WordPress.org/.com is so poor?
- Or is it so popular because people are asking such small/simple to answer questions that it's easy to answer them?
- Or is it because there is a higher number of "hobbyists" that use WP over say Drupal?

Couldn't that be just as likely a reading from those stats?

The reality is there is no good long-term measurement for quality, quantity nor responsiveness of a community for an Open Source Project. We have to go with our gut, and our own experiences. Obviously we're all WordPress fan's (I believe you're now on the Theme review team Chip - congrats), but in my experience this community more than any other has a tendency to only want to hear the good about itself.

In my experience, finding out answers to simple WP questions is very quick; but rises at an exponential rate as you move from simple to moderate to advanced. In large part due to the input/output of it's community.