The reason is simple: ECF resources need to be comprehensive and accurate, even if a little too extensive (and incomprehensible) to some. Plus, some distillation and organisation is sometimes needed.
The standard aimed at for these occasional topic updates is Wikipedia but always accurate; a community version of an academic resource but without any agenda-driven interference. Some pages on Wikipedia are really good, especially as an overview of the topic or a starting point for further research. They will often tell you all you need to know, as a passer-by; see the page on regulatory capture, for example. Others are useless junk contaminated by commercial opponents and crackpots (see the e-cigarette page for a good example of that). We can't run ECF as a wiki, indeed it has a separate section for that purpose, but what we can do is preserve an accurate record of the technical development of the PV. As the information is scattered across millions of pages, some kind of occasional rationalisation is helpful: an outline of the topic, an update on the situation, a distillation of what we know, a clarification of the facts as against the propaganda, an attempt to list and balance the various conflicting narratives, a list of other resources.
See the articles in The Library or at ecigarette-politics.com for examples.
I'm not going to write a book because there is no value in it for me of any kind compared to the huge amount of time and effort it would take me to get it right by my terms, as a perfectionist. Etter has already written a good enough one, and although a more technically accurate one, and one more representative of the community-driven expansion of the world of ecigs, and one that far better describes the establishment's opposition to ecigs and protection of the smoking economy could all be written, those tasks are not for me. Rather, what I'm interested is in getting our technical resources accurate, in terms of the real history of vaping as against an outsider's foggy view of it that probably only goes as far as some sort of outline description of basic products and a couple of legal decisions.
After all, if you can't research the real history of vaping on ECF, and read about the most important people in it - the inventors, modders and developers of entirely new types of equipment - then where can you go? There is nowhere else. ECF is the best historical record of vaping in existence, it is totally comprehensive from 2007 onward. But it can often do with some help, as the info is scattered across 14 million posts. In twenty years' time, when it is obvious that millions of lives have been saved despite a tremendous struggle against government oppression based on protecting official and commercial revenues, who will know what the real story was?
So as you will see by my stuff elsewhere, it is important to me to get these things organised correctly, to make any resources comprehensive and accurate, and to cover all the loose ends that get forgotten about. RBAs are significant enough now to have their own dedicated areas here, and when that point is reached, the job might as well be done properly. It hasn't really, before, because no one was 'curating' the story, if you like - everyone was just too busy. For example: who invented the carto, who developed it, who invented the carto tank? And so on. The resources that result from this approach go way too far for most in this era of 20-second attention spans, though.
You could describe people like the ECF modders, the ECF chemists, and Peaceoffcake, Raidy, Van, Zen, Markbugs and all the others as the heroes of vaping and the people who made it work; or you could ignore them and just go for say Han Li, Jide Yao, Ray Storey and Judge Leon. But at least the choice should be available to you. More than anything else I'm interested in the actuality rather than some distorted perception of it that is cooked up to suit someone's agenda. Somebody may want to know the real story, one day.
And thanks for asking, by the way
