Placement of the "Post your answer" field

Question

I know the immediate answer to this question would be, "... because the user should go through the posted answers to see if anything new needs to be added"

But, here's my point. UX (and most computer related things) changes over time and sometimes even the most highly upvoted answers become obsolete. In case of a highly popular questions (100+ upvotes) with highly upvoted marked answer (100+ upvotes), the answers count (generally) is huge.

Shouldn't there be any shortcut or a hook that allows the user to quickly answer the question rather than having to scroll through 20+ answers?

Answer 1

Well you've answered your own question here.

"... because the user should go through the posted answers to see if anything new needs to be added"

But there's more to it than that too. If a question has 20 answers then that means that people viewing it are going to digest far less of the overall post than if it only has 2 answers. By adding more answers to a post you're adding more volume to it. People only really read about 20% of the copy on a webpage so you'd just be adding more noise to that already noisy post.

So absolutely you should read the previous answers before posting your own. Just because things move on, that doesn't mean you should just assume that a 5 year old question doesn't have any relevant answers anymore. Read them all, decide if you have anything new and useful to add, and then you can decide if it's worth answering.