Hi @Bilious , this comes up a lot from new members, including yesterday.
My take on this policy is that taking away the ability to create a new topic “trains” new members to look for existing threads to post their questions, because there’s almost certainly something out there already.
The mods try to avoid duplicate topics, because it’s harder to find information when it’s spread all over the place, so if a new member posts something in a new topic, the mods will often close out the new topic and move the post to the appropriate existing thread. It’s a lot of aggravation for everyone, including the original poster.
On the other hand, if you’ve searched the forum and can’t find an existing thread, then you can always ask a mod to create it for you.