You can search SO, you can see the dozens of other answers to similar questions and you can see other answers by the person answering you.
Realtime works for some set of easy quick answers - if the answerers are in your time zone.
I am pretty sure its the opposite, a complicated questions needs a feedback mechanism, you say X is wrong, I ask well what happens with Y, whats the output of Z. this really works better in realtime.
I find a lot of application / language / library developers are in irc reasonably often, whereas the questions on forums are a bit more of run of the mill how do I do types
