You may see and appreciate the view, but you'll never really get to know the place intimately.
I seem to be the sole volunteer to state the thru-hiker's POV, since I do section hikes and therefore seem to be the nearest equivalent to a thru-hiker hanging out here.
Anyway... a thru-hike for most of the folks who do it is a once-in-a-lifetime event. They'll have decades of their lives to devote to knowing some place intimately. I'm pretty certain most of them do (or, in the case of oldster thru-hikers, did) that. So, while they are two different things, they not mutually exclusive in the course of a hiking "career".
I agree.
Thru-hikes take weeks and often months to complete, and the majority of people simply don't have such luxury of time and thus are unable to extend their thru-hike any longer than necessary. For example, the CT is 485miles and if I did an average of 10miles per day it would take me almost 7 weeks to complete. That doesn't include any days were I may be tied down due to inclement weather. Even as a college student, I didn't have this amount of time off, even during the summer. So to complete a thru-hike in such a limited amount of time; one needs to hike more miles per day.
I can always come back another time and spend 7-10 days hiking just a few sections of a trail that I loved and get to know it intimately.
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