Thank you @Peta7, I hope at least some of the discussion was helpful to you and other readers.
A couple years ago, Airbnb floated the idea of a locally-based Host Mentor program, in which some incentive would be offered to experienced hosts to help newbies learn the website, get clear on city laws, and sharpen their hosting skills. Like most pilot projects of big young tech firms, this one never got off the runway. I'd hazard a guess it's because it would've meant allocating a lot of resources to a project that yields no profits. But also, it's hard to imagine there are that many hosts with the time and interest in training their own competitors for free.
As that program apparently died, Airbnb shifted to what are effectively localized lobbying groups, in which hosts can volunteer their time to help defend Airbnb's corporate interests against undesirable new regulations. Around the same time, they replaced peer-organized Groups with the format we're using now, which in turn replaced host mentors with neutral, privately-contracted moderators. Looking at all that, I'd say the gravitational pull is away from a "buddy system" and toward something a bit more mechanized - as you'd expect from a company that's more intrinsically about algorithms than about hospitality.
Still, despite everything, there are a lot of people on here as well as on some off-site forums and Facebook groups (where you can post more anonymously) that regularly donate their time to sharing experiences, advice, and unfiltered opinions. We're all humans, it's going to be imperfect and biased and sometimes abrasive, but I've sure learned a lot from reading the whole spectrum of people's perspectives and I'm sure you will too!
