Of course I'm still pretty new here, but it seems to me that once upon a time a LONG thread meant that a worthy subject had been thoroughly engaged by a bunch of people with interesting, smart, informative, or at least funny things to say.
I guess whenever that happened a sort of brief "celebrity" attached itself to the originator, so that people began to TRY to make long threads -- but they didn't care to make them worth reading.
The idea that a long thread meant that something WORTHY had been achieved must have been replaced at some point by the idea that a long thread was an achievement in itself.
And of course there's the whole "number of posts" seniority thing, which combined with the above tendency has resulted in many long threads filled with
and
etc -- but little else.
All things change, and those who mark change and remember the past seldom do so with gladness.
j-