I've got to say that I never really saw this from the position of an early graduate student or late undergraduate.

that's okay, we understand. Your age ain't exactly much of a secret :)

(Even if less than half of you know about my particular eccentricity.)

I got 10 (in fact, exactly the 10 most correctly-gotten), but remembered 15 out of 17 quotes.

Also, +1 to pit_trout's comment on Sporcle.

(oops, spoiler'd)

It's a bit unsettling to know that I'm more predictable than Andrew L, and on par with the guy who puts his quote at the end of every one of his posts =/.

Regarding getting to know MO users better than your in-person colleagues, see this quiz.

Of course, being a social gathering place for mathematicians is not MO's purpose, nor even on the radar as far as MO's porpoises go. But it's a nice side-effect. And as much as I am happy with MO being elitist, I am unhappy with MO being exclusive.

Trying to "fix" things by making it harder in any way for people to immediately come to the site and ask questions is a remedy that, to my mind, could be much worse than the ill we're trying to cure. I have already seen a lot of resentment about MO elsewhere on the internet (especially math.SE) from people who think that it has an exclusive, club-like atmosphere. These people are right to the extent that it is designed for the rather select group of professional, research mathematicians and is not especially welcoming to others. However, they're wrong in the sense that the club we're cultivating is not the "MO club" or the "Berkeley club" or the "hotshot young algebraic geometers club" -- it really is both accessible and appealing to all stripes of professional mathematicians all over the world. (Fun fact: I have never met any of the MO moderators in person -- correction: I think I met Scott Carnahan once, and I was friends with his girlfriend at one point -- or had any prior dealings with them whatsoever. But as a function of MO I have grown to think of these people as my colleagues, and in some ways I have grown closer to them than some of my actual colleagues whom I mostly just say hi to when I pass them in the hall. And with regard to the user base as a whole: participating in MO has been the most positive, significant networking experience of my professional life. It's not even close. When I meet people in person now, I'm "that Math Overflow guy"...)

Believe me that when I tell people about MO and what a great site it is, their most common concern is whether the site is difficult to use or requires registration, and so forth. I always tell them that you can just jump in immediately and figure out within ten minutes how to ask or answer a question. Let's stop for a moment and reflect on how well our site is doing: almost every week a truly superstar mathematician pops up, often people who were world-famous before the internet even existed. Raising the barrier to entry even a little bit is going to scare off some people that we would be absolutely delighted to have. Let's not do that, even if we could.

On the question at hand: I think people don't give enough credit to the ease of moderating bad questions. I mean, yes, over the past couple of days there has been a burst of closed questions, and that has been annoying, but have they really been that disruptive/hard to ignore? As long as people keep asking and answering good questions, they'll disappear pretty fast. At the end of the day, I guess the question comes down to how many good questions you want to make it too annoying for people to ask in return for filtering out some bad ones. Will has shown that he's not particularly worried about this point, but I don't really agree; we'll never really know which questions might not have been asked had we required people to wait until getting rep before being able to ask. At the moment, I think things are in the "ain't broke; don't fix" stage, which is rather convenient, since we couldn't fix even if we wanted to.

The moderators are not paying money to use the old software, but they're also ambivalent about moving over to the new software, since it would entail some changes that would simply be unacceptable. An optimal situation would be if we could use the new software but pay monthly (as was originally planned) while maintaining our autonomy from the rest of the SE network.