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thomblake comments on Causation as Bias (sort of) - Less Wrong
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A PhD-level philosopher knows where to look, and so expected value of the answer they can find is high enough, as opposed to the situation for a random educated person. This is very unlike the situation in other sciences, where even few weeks' study can give you a lot of genuine insight in how things work, likely answering your questions if the answers are known and not awfully deep. With philosophy, you are going to be led in circles for years, emerging more confused than at the start, with a few simple answers and likely a serious memetic illness.
The good answers in philosophy are easy enough to find. We just offload them onto other disciplines for easy reference. For instance, once we'd gotten a good handle on natural philosophy, we started putting bits of it into new disciplines like 'physics'.
Complaining about not finding easy answers in academic philosophy is like complaining that your R&D department hasn't manufactured anything this week.
You suggested that 'studying philosophy' was not a "good use of one's time". Given how much we've already gone around the whole 'philosophy is useless' meme, I'd expect such a comment to just get downvotes from the at least a dozen or so philosophers kicking around these parts.
When was the last time another discipline was spun out of philosophy?
psychology, a century ago?