I agree, too. The fact that FR is “not like those other sites” is a feature, not a glitch.
Lots of tech people here would be happy to volunteer their time to work on improvements like this.
We see lots of duplicate posts. Copying and pasting author and title and url is manual labor that is prone to errors. This is a simple improvement that could attempt the autofill that a poster could go with or not. Would not impact the rest of the site
Some kind of technology group could also help with outages, or help if any of the existing help get hit by the proverbial bus. But managing such a group would in itself be added work for Jim.
I suspect a zillion FReeper wannabees are put off by the "what do you mean I have to learn basic HTML to post?" dimension of "membership." Thus they are scared away, and go join Facebook.
Call me old fashioned or crazy. I know from experience that I appreciate more the things for which I've had to WORK vs been given to me. I wear having to post via HTML etc as a badge of honor. Concurrently, people scared away by the "antiquated" technology are the lowest members of the food chain and will probably be replaced by the rat.