[Nereid speaking as Nereid, not as a BAUT Moderator]

To Swift and Moose: What you write, at one level, is how I got into PF's TD in the first place (before I discovered either UT or BABB).

However, the objective evidence* is hard to ignore - the kind of ideal example you cite is rare to almost non-existent.

And, the evidence of PF's IR section is a good counter-example: the quality of the threads there is high, and where there are holes, the 'ATMer' seems to have no difficulty writing focussed, non-ATM questions, in the appropriate (non-IR) part of PF, to get advice, support, and good suggestions.

Also, you'll see that the IR guidelines are actually quite generous to ATM ideas ... those that are filtered out are only those 'which contain obvious misrepresentations or gross misunderstanding of basic accepted science', which are 'already strongly inconsistent with the results of prior experiments' (observations, in BAUT's astronomy case), which do not 'contain a section that either cites experiments that have been done that decide between the new and old theories, or it must propose experiments that could be done to decide between the two', and so on.

*i.e. those hundreds and hundreds of TD threads, and, dare I say it, almost all BAUT ATM threads. I did a rough estimate once; even being quite generous, no more than ~1-2% of threads are close to your ideal example.