Has been discussed, and yes it's just plain dumb.

I agree, it takes a lot of everyone's enthusiasm away to have to wait for posts to be let out of the queue.  There are plenty of people that would answer quicker if the posts were there, and when you are trying to help someone it is very difficult when you have to wait for their posts to go through the queue.  You also have the scenario where one moderator works on the queue and answers all the questions as they are releasing the post, so that is pretty much telling people other people not to bother waiting for a post you may have been able to answer very quickly.

Yes, this has been discussed before and the SPAM answer is always the same, but I manage a highly trafficked forum where the SPAM is easily removed by a moderator after being reported and it really is a very small part of the overall posts.  Most Spammers won't go to the trouble of getting a user ID just to get their message to show up for a short amount of time.

It's not going to change though, so why did I waste my time writing this?  :)