I had the same experience. I was new to stackoverflow, and got all kind of flak for my question (but not a single useful answer), but then came along Tim Peters and provided a thoughtful answer that improved on my original approach and a solution that worked perfectly [1]. I was blown away that someone with so much clout in the python community would bother to take quite a bit time out of their day to help a noob. That answer was probably one of most important reasons why I continued to hang out on stackoverflow, which made me a much better problem solver in the long run.

RIP, Tim.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/39378895/2912349