In most cases that my few posts were edited/combined, they definately did NOT meet this part of the offered explanation, "for no logicial or beneficial reason". No complaints though, I understand the reasons and have already tried to combine my own posts accordingly.
The multiple posts in a single thread usually gets started from us wanting to quote and respond to various other participants comments, which are in multiple posts, not just one. Would be neat if there was a way to quote more than one comment/post without having to do any major copying/pasting, etc.