The ones offended by people asking questions that have been asked before are the ones who should know better.

First, they should know that on a basic level, all search functions for all communities suck and are fail to a large extent. Forum search sucks, Stack Overflow search sucks, Facebook search sucks, Reddit and Hubski search sucks, etc. There is just too much to catalog and too many tiny little use-cases to cover. Nobody can be happy too much of the time with forum search.

I've yet to see a community where a newbie, foreign to the interface/rules/community norms/etc can find and use the search button to quickly and easily discover if their particular variation on a question has been answered before. Some can, but on the balance, no site has been able to deliver here.

Second, what are new people even saying when they ask a question? I submit that half the time, they're just curious and excited, and they just want to engage with people. 90% of the questions people pose to a community can be answered with a quick Google search. They don't want an answer, they want to talk.

Many of these questions are, at heart, about the weather.

So as far as I'm concerned, 'ask_xyz' formats are to a large extent for beginners to get up to speed quicker than isolated research alone with the crappy search bar (and no, "spend months lurking until you get it" isn't an answer), and for people to just engage with the same questions that people use to engage in time and time again, in many different places. They're also for people who have been around the site for a while and feel the same way. If you're not down with that, on Hubski you can block the tag.

None of this is to say that reposts and search aren't problems to be solved. They are, but looking at it from a 'sytems' perspective, almost none of the anger should be directed at the users, and if it bothers you enough, you should try and come up with some combination of process and technology that ameliorates the situation while respecting all of what people are actually using 'ask_xyz' to do (talk about the weather and navigate beginner functions). And imho, if you go with the 'solving the problem route', you should probably be pretty dispassionate. Getting mad at reposts online is like getting mad at a Winter climate in the city you live in.