I find it odd that you say I am absent when I have been working towards the site day and night. Most of the time this is behind the scenes. If there is something that is needed, please let me know. You claim I am not here, yet I check the site all the time. My role changed from communicating a lot to making sure things always work. For example, you are probably not aware that there is an e-mail problem that I have been looking into all day. I will also be having a very serious surgery next week, but I will still check the forums. On the topic of "whoosh", I believe this has gone on long enough and will close the thread since it is straying off topic. The matter at hand is that the site has outgrown its original clothes and I am looking into ways to improve that situation.
The reason for the "Valued Contributor" award is true -- people who make this many posts to the site are valid contributors. Whether or not you dislike what they are saying is subjective, but the very fact that they have made X amount of posts indicates that they are contributors nonetheless, and valued by this site nonetheless. (If they had made 500 or 1000 useless posts they would likely have been banned, thus not earning the title.)
I was hoping this would not turn into a flame/complaint fest. Can we focus on constructive criticism? I am willing to answer anyone. Right now I am testing our e-mail system for registrations and PMs, but a lot of the work I do is unfortunately alone. I have reached out in the past for people to contact me via IM or phone but never has one staff member done so. I continue to manage many tasks at once and this may not be as simple as you think. A site that gets this many hits becomes more difficult to manage every day.