nobody in the world will answer my question - It sounds like you haven't been asking the right questions. You'd be surprised at who turns up to answer really good questions.
All 7 steps are really overkill, but the first four, and enough of five ("inspection or experimentation") to apply what you find out from the first four steps, really are essential.
The last two steps (skilled friends & source code) are really optional, and if you need to resort to these to find the answer, it is likely that your problem is interesting to the mailing list.
It's worth comparing ESR's essay to SO's How to Ask page - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/how-to-ask - which asks much less of the questioner, and reflects the difference between mailing list culture and that at SO.
I would expect the primary differences don't stem from "culture" so much as differing technical platforms. If your question is actually a Wiki, and can be interactively refined in conjunction with the answerers, the need to complete the checklist in advance is lessened. In the end, the checklist will pretty much end up filled out one way or another, and there's still a such thing as a bad question and a bad questioner, but in both cases there's a better (if not 100%) chance to rehabilitate them interactively.
All 7 steps are really overkill, but the first four, and enough of five ("inspection or experimentation") to apply what you find out from the first four steps, really are essential.
The last two steps (skilled friends & source code) are really optional, and if you need to resort to these to find the answer, it is likely that your problem is interesting to the mailing list.
It's worth comparing ESR's essay to SO's How to Ask page - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/how-to-ask - which asks much less of the questioner, and reflects the difference between mailing list culture and that at SO.