You mentioned that having a contact form would also help people and prevent so many threads from being made in the Help Boards. However, that would deprive helpful floofs from trying to help too. And as a result of that, the Member of the Season concept would be pointless, because many users are nominated/"elected" due to the thoughts that their benevolence and helpfulness needs to be appreciated by the rest of the community, and if it's just the Staff that are being contacted with rarely any Help threads being made, that defeats the purpose of MotS altogether and people will just be nominated for being 'popular' amongst the community. Eventually, people would probably not even want to nominate anymore and it would eventually die down.
PMing Staff members on the forum is easy enough. Making a Help thread gives the users plenty of opportunity for people to get quick replies from other people that are NOT staff, and are online around the time when the thread is made, and that's especially helpful if Staff are not online during that time.
Your idea is great yes, and I especially agree with the mentions idea, but I personally don't see the need of a contact form.