I guess that would depend on how many threads you display per page and perhaps the size of your monitor too. For this forum specifically 8 sticky threads (for me) takes up little space except what I deem as appropriate for the amount of sticky threads that I would expect to appear for a forum of this size. The Scripts & Popups and Developer Forum have no stickies. Bug Reports, Feature Suggestions and General Discussion have very few. It's really only mIRC Help and Connection Issues due to the nature of the questions asked - a lot of the time there are set answers, whereas scripting/bugs can be more ambiguous.
To be honest, I sometimes feel like flooding the first page of every forum with stickies so more people might look at the threads before posting.
Having individual posts allows quick reference to specific topics that are often asked, aswell as become large threads (if kept unlocked) to gather lots of information about a particular topic. If it were turned into a 'FAQ' then I should imagine all links that currently link to those threads would be broken and we'd have even more threads that rehash the same topic. As much as repetitive topics might seem bad at times, you only need to look at the page views of the stickies to see that they are used.
There is an
mIRC FAQ and
IRC FAQ that people are free (and encouraged) to link to.
You can edit the number of threads you see on the front page of each forum by going to your 'My Home' settings, click on the 'edit' link next to the sentence,
'Display preferences, number of shown threads, languages, colors...'. This may suit your needs better?
I'm pretty sure this issue has been raised by people in the past. That's my opinion on the matter
