Welllll...it takes, approximately, three to five useful answers. Note that they don't need to be The Answer To Life, Universe, And Everything; they don't need to be the longest, or fastest, or best-looking answers to that question - just useful.

I've run a tiny experiment on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/users/779183/friar-tuck - it took me, from "logout and clear all cookies" to "Commenting privilege unlocked", twenty-five minutes (1500 seconds) of wall-time, start to finish; no cheating, no sockpuppetting - just answering three (3) easy questions in a mildly useful way and watching the upvotes roll in.

Alas, "I come to the __Q&A__ site 'often', but can't be bothered to __ask__ or __answer__ anything at all, how come they deny me privileges?" sounds a bit more entitled than "the System keeps me down and prevents me from commenting," doesn't it?

I didn't mean to sound entitled, it's not a big deal to me (and others if I was to hazard a guess).

Normally when I hit SO I'm stuck and often it's not on my dollar. I always intend to go back and add something, but when I do have free time, I like to get away from the computer and thus I never end up contributing.

Well, that's pretty much what many SO's users do; and there's nothing wrong with that :)

I have misunderstood your previous post, then, and I'm sorry for that - I thought you were complaining that getting the privileges is too hard.