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.