Even after being put on the front page, I feel like people got requests answered faster when they were their own separate topics.

I don't disagree with the Hunting Thread (its better than having clutter), but isn't it strange that no one uses it, or answers the requests?

Not really. People won't answer what they don't know the answer to. I can't think of any reasonable explanation for why individual threads would get that much quicker attention than a bulk thread other than that people seem to like avoiding bulk threads. That said, I've not noticed any such trend with the image hunting thread, so...