You are perfectly right, it is the new unexperienced users that are a real challenge here. They come for help, because they feel we are the right place or - even better for us - they were told we are.
Yes, we are and we want to be the right place to search for help when there are issues with Ubuntu. But we have our limits as defined in our FAQ, and we do not have a magic wand to foresee and solve all issues users might possibly experience with their system. Also we can not possibly help users who do not provide information we asked for.
It is my believe that we do need much patience with users new to the Linux world. They often need explanation of very basic terminology before we are able to help them. They will not understand answers to the dupe question we had sent them to. It may even be that they do not even understand what information it is we asked for. Only after we started to help them we may find out that we really need to be that basic. It may become very frustrating at times.
But after we succeeded solving their issue we may be granted with another avid Ubuntu user who wants to give back what they received. This alone is worth the effort. But obviously it is prone to fail quite often. But with every failed case we may have learned a bit for the next issue.
In the case you mentioned the issue clearly came from them asking another question closely related to their primary issue (i.e. data recovery after an accidentally overwrting of their partitions during Ubuntu installation) without giving us this necessary information or a link to their previous question. If I had more time I might have come more often back to the original question thus avoiding them asking a sequel question but I was only able to have a look every hour.
The follow up question should be close as too localized, or as a dupe to their first question.
