Over-Merging of threads?

[Schneed10]

In general, to me, merging makes sense when you have two threads that are created nearly simultaneously by different people who coincidentally wanted to talk about the same topic at the same time. Like when two different people see news and come here to create threads about it. That's perfect merge material.

And when you have an ongoing topic, and a new development occurs related to that topic, I'd like to see a new thread. It catches your attention as soon as you get onto the site.

In general, I would think mods would want to avoid threads that get too long. Because people come to the site sometimes wanting to discuss a certain topic. But if threads are 200 posts long, I can't blame people for not searching them. Long threads would seem to contribute to the unnecessary creation of new threads. I get that mods want to avoid the rehashing of discussions though. I'm not sure how to manage that. But if we merge too often, the site could become a bit less user-friendly.

Glad to offer my feedback, and I want mods to understand that I don't intend it as criticism. Just want to be helpful and offer an opinion as one of the users who comes to the site very often. As the site is growing it becomes harder to manage, and despite the growth it's still by far my favorite site on the net.