I think it's perfect, personally. I found Stack Overflow through Google, searching for something. The fact that the most up-voted questions are on the top makes finding the answer to your question extremely quick.
The only "barrier to entry" that I found when I first joined was all the "inside jokes" (like you :P) and acronyms (call me stupid, but I didn't know what "SO" meant for the longest time). But I guess that's to be expected, and it doesn't really hamper one's ability to find the answer to his questions quickly.
Nowdays, if I'm looking for something on Google and I see a result from SO, I go there first thing.
Edit: I'd like to add that the one thing that did not make sense to me at first was community wikis. I just didn't understand the point of them. It didn't help that everyone else magically knew when questions should be made wikis or not, but never really gave any reasons. I got the hang of it eventually, but at first I always got nervous when asking a question, and asked myself, "Should this be a community wiki? Is it going to get closed if I don't make it one?" The solution to this would be to add some kind of "help" or "what's this?" link next to the community wiki checkbox, that goes to the SOFAQ or a similar page explaining what community wikis are and what they're used for.