There was a time when this community prided itself on handling FAQ questions with answers like the following:

Google is your friend. If you have a general question the first thing you should try is a quick search.

As for it being hard to not call it elitism, I agree. I also find it stupid. Consider the merits of reaping vs the above short post. Reaping takes more work. The person whose post was reaped gets no feedback, their post just disappears, so you are liable to get a post along the lines of, "I already asked this but PerlMonks seems to have eaten my question..." By contrast a short post pointing at how to use a search engine will encourage the person who asked to use a search engine next time. Better yet, other random people who happen to browse PerlMonks will see that people on PerlMonks would happily start with a search engine for vague, general questions and are more likely to do that rather than post themselves. Finally giving the friendly answer makes the site nicer for everyone.

Why then would people reap? It makes no sense to me. It seems like a recipe to get frustrated and get even more opportunities to get frustrated down the road.