And yes, search is good and people should use it!

Well there is another use for them, I have you to thank for reminding of it internet =)
General admin messages, particularly of the kind that say

"Try posting in the other threads for the same thing. I'm about to start considering reposts as spam and handing out week long bans for it, which is completely asinine of me, but now you have fair warning."

Lets face it, a sticky topic with that in would work much better than a post in a locked topic that I doubt many people will read.

Yes, I know people should use the search bar. The fact remains however, is that some do not. Though I'm not naive enough to assume that a sticky on CSS would completely eliminate the duplicates, I still belive that it would cut them significantly.

I really don't think there would be a need for so many stickies as to clog up the front page of the forums. All forums I know of have between 1-4 stickies, never any more than that.
It's not like any old topic will get stickied. I would assume an admin would be involved in some sort of approval process on the matter before something were to be stuck to the top of a forum.