"[StackOverflow's rules] are intended to create a body of precise questions and answers ..."
Suitable for informing a junior code monkey working to someone else's plan. Yes, we all understand this. Yes, we agree it is useful.
But junior code monkeys grow and learn. On their way to becoming a senior software engineer, they will ask a question like "how do I solve such and such problem with a Ruby hash" and the answer is "you probably don't want to--take the stakeholder to lunch and do some requirements analysis, then come back and we'll help you solve the systems architecture problem that you will have just discovered".
This answer will be expunged by the moderators for being subjective and argumentative. Yes, of course it is. The most valuable questions about software creation have to do with purpose and architecture. Software creators are people who need mentoring, not robots looking for answers from autistic oracles.
I have no objection to putting only objective questions on the standard view. It's expedient for people who need to learn some detail right now. It will get more eyeballs, more Google juice, and more monetization. But there is no need to delete subjective questions when they can be trivially tagged and filtered off into another view.
Actually, that answer would very likely be appreciated as long as you phrased it politely. I've very often told people on Stack Overflow that they were asking the wrong question, told them how to start off on the right path, and gotten the checkmark for it.
(I actually will sometimes answer the original question if it's not too involved or impossible, and include a note along the lines of "See this? This is why it sucks for what you want to do.")
Suitable for informing a junior code monkey working to someone else's plan. Yes, we all understand this. Yes, we agree it is useful.
But junior code monkeys grow and learn. On their way to becoming a senior software engineer, they will ask a question like "how do I solve such and such problem with a Ruby hash" and the answer is "you probably don't want to--take the stakeholder to lunch and do some requirements analysis, then come back and we'll help you solve the systems architecture problem that you will have just discovered".
This answer will be expunged by the moderators for being subjective and argumentative. Yes, of course it is. The most valuable questions about software creation have to do with purpose and architecture. Software creators are people who need mentoring, not robots looking for answers from autistic oracles.
I have no objection to putting only objective questions on the standard view. It's expedient for people who need to learn some detail right now. It will get more eyeballs, more Google juice, and more monetization. But there is no need to delete subjective questions when they can be trivially tagged and filtered off into another view.