Note that I'm thinking less of 'subjective experience of PM' and more of 'why doesn't the FAQ contain a hint about this'.

Example for a comment/addition:

From the days of yore, I don't really mind <pre>. And I did mind having to suffer using a line-breaking <code> for stuff bound to never be downloaded. Consider a mix or black and red plus-signs plus line breaks in a diff -u sample, of which you want to copy/paste a small but interesting section of 5 lines into a text file. Unnecessary needless extra work. Selecting the plus character as linebreak sigil and its placement at start of line truly must be the crowning piece of art from a master in the art of sadism!

Until I finally stumbled on the no code wrapping display setting: A no pain button!? Yeah! But I still harm others not having set it. Oh my. Sigh. evil_grin(TM).

So for me personally, the PM-newbie experience pains would have been reduced if just a quick hint were to be added to the PM-FAQ and also to the Allowed HTML Markup page.

Example for dealing with such comments/additions:

One approach might be a well-known thread to add such observations to, immediately visible to other newcomers, and maybe given a once-a-year mining by sitedocclan(sp?) incorporating the most interesting tidbits into non-commentable faqs and documents.

One way to tame the thread size and load times: After mining, maybe 'archive' the thread as newbie-tutorial-comments-from-2008, creating the new thread, relinking the tutortials to that. Add an index to threads past at the beginning of the new thread.

Maybe also offer a gzipped variant containing both current and archived newbie threads, as already suggested by Brother Anonymous. Maybe include the tutorial/faq in the archive as well.