[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.