Job? No. Function? Frequently...
THIS! One thousand times, THIS! If you are "lying back", you are not contributing. Period. You can add whichever qualifiers you like, dress it in whichever garb you fancy, you still are not contributing. If you are not contributing, then we are better off lynching you and gaining whatever info we can from that. Harsh, but that's the name of the game.
Setup speculating is a stalling technique often employed by scum, basically to look like they are contributing without actually moving the dialogue in any fruitful direction. In short: we don't know what the setup is. We will not know what the setup is, unless mod does a reveal at the end, which is not gaurenteed, so we may never know. Speculation and trying to count scum is a meaningless activity... Hell, I may try to dig up the "Somewhat Vanilla" game for you. It illustrates my point on how little players know, superbly.
As for the effectiveness of early accusations: you're still new. You haven't seen someone completely flip their shit as soon as the first finger points their way. It happens, and thus accusations at any stage are vital to the game. If nothing else, when someone presses another player, and they respond, that leaves clues to be analyzed if/when one or the other is lynched, and we now know their alignment.
True. Except the content of the posts they do make. That can be as telling/convincing as any number of bs fluff posts. Typically though, if someone is posting a shitload of fluff, they are hiding in plain sight, so to speak. That said, I've been known to spam a game thread if I'm really digging that particular game. So yeah... Both are correct, you may get more posts from one player than another, but you shouldn't be counting posts, rather reading and thinking through the content of the one post, not glancing over the many.
Well, at least you recognize that it is scummy...
Hopefully, though, you got the mangled, confused, zemaj-style logics I tried to convey. Not really 'reasoned explanations', but I gave it a shot, anyway...
Cheers! (oh, how I miss the old emotes... :Guinness: would have followed the "Cheers!" once upon a wayback...)
Assumption is the mother of all f* ups.