[andybak]

Yeah - but I'm just playing with hypothetical ideal cases here. "Annoying flawed habits of Stack Overflow moderators" isn't something that's on my list of things I'm thinking about. ;-)

EDIT - which got me thinking. Maybe the "correct" thing to do is answer the original question as asked but gently point out to the person asking it that there is probably a better solution for them if only they had asked a different question.

The original question still stands and has an answer useful for other people. The original questioner has the opportunity to learn and ask the question they should have asked in the first place.

It's going to be annoying for someone - so it should at least be the person that kicked things off in the first place.