[zbentley]

Rules/purity oriented folks (what you call "The Pedant Police") do make it harder to use . . . for askers and a little bit for answerers. But they make it a lot easier to use for people who want to find already-written answers to their questions. As Jeff says in TFA, that's the tradeoff they want to make:

> Most importantly, we realized that each question is asked by one person but the answers are seen by thousands of people who found it through a search. So we decided to optimize everything to be useful for the thousands, not the individual. We literally have 1000 visitors for every person who asks a question. That’s why we sort the answers by votes. It’s also why we optimize for questions and answers that will be helpful to other people, later.

[clavalle]

And that's great if you want a collection of uncontroversial answers to common questions.

But if you want to go off the beaten track a bit it leads to problems.

And any expert is going to ask questions off the beaten track.

So...they are limiting SO to relatively inexperienced developers looking for answers to common questions.

Considering that they make money by selling the talent that uses the site I'm not sure if it is wise to make that trade-off as rigidly as they do.

[aeorgnoieang]

This is a pretty good example of a probably pretty common phenomenon whereby different people have drastically different experiences about what's, nominally at least, 'the same thing'.

I've definitely noticed what you described and I've spent some not-entirely-insignificant amount of time fighting it on the meta site.

But I've also had a pretty nice experience with other portions (e.g. tags) of the site.