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".