Of course.
There's no correlation between a member's forum post count and their level of integrity or honesty.
In many cases particularly on our local forums here in Australia you will find the truism to be the opposite since those with extremely high post counts have typically lost all sense of perspective of the outside real world.

But are those thoughts from the prolific posters both informative and conducive to the greater good of the hobby or just online overcompensating for real life failures?

With pinside it is primarily the former, whilst with our domestic Aussie forums it is largely the latter.

That's not hiding in a cave, that's confronting using reality.

Good deal and it usually pays off since the seller typically has other machines or some other pinball related ephemera gathering dust and which they are willing to part with.

Tyranny of distance is par for the course down here in Australia. If you aren't prepared to do a sunrise to sunsets worth of driving to pick up a machine based on a couple of blurry photos taken in someone's back shed with only natural light as a source then you just aren't deep enough into the hobby.

My record is jumping on a plane and flying 10,000 miles to inspect in person a stash of machines that I had yet to pay a deposit for. This was just to make sure the machines matched the photos and description that was provided. The added bonus being you can always negotiate a better deal in person.

Everyone complains that there are no good deals left out there, but they are the ones who expect machines to just fall into their lap by spending their days sitting on their backside and scanning ebay/craigslist/gumtree for the aussies on here et al. If you are prepared to do the legwork there are plenty of machines packed away in sheds gathering dust out there whose owners don't have any idea of the resurgence of pinball or even the fact that there are online forums devoted to it.