I would love a place that works almost exactly like Stack Exchange, but which is geared toward polling experts' opinions on something (which is a thing that SE explicitly says it doesn't allow.)
Like, I can solve most concrete single answer problems (the kind SE is "for") on my own by digging into the offending component's source code. Reverse engineering if necessary.
The type of question that I really want to ask others, is when I have multiple options that all seem good to me as solutions, and I want guidance on which way to go — or, more deeply, which factors I should consider in my selection. (Example: "what should I use as a database for this project?")
This is exactly the sort of decision that a manager on a product, would hire a lead engineer for that project for their expertise in, and so would expect said lead engineer to be able to lay out for them when asked.
I feel like all the right people are there on SE to be able to answer this type of question. But SE itself just doesn't let them do it — or at least, isn't structured to incentivize them to do it.
Which is fine. SE wasn't meant to be the end-all be-all of Q&A. You can have any kind of Q&A, just not on SE. SE is simply not interested in those as it would dilute the other topics that don't lend too well to those policies.
SE has become (for a while now) the Platonic Form for RTFM.
It doesn't matter how much effort one puts into researching and troubleshooting (including reading many F (man)uals and forums) before asking, nor does it matter how much detail you provide to show how X (which is supposed to do Y, and does on many machines), does Z on yours for some reason, and, BTW, here's my logs and output for foo[1-5], all you get is "asked and answered RTFM, n00b."
Like, I can solve most concrete single answer problems (the kind SE is "for") on my own by digging into the offending component's source code. Reverse engineering if necessary.
The type of question that I really want to ask others, is when I have multiple options that all seem good to me as solutions, and I want guidance on which way to go — or, more deeply, which factors I should consider in my selection. (Example: "what should I use as a database for this project?")
This is exactly the sort of decision that a manager on a product, would hire a lead engineer for that project for their expertise in, and so would expect said lead engineer to be able to lay out for them when asked.
I feel like all the right people are there on SE to be able to answer this type of question. But SE itself just doesn't let them do it — or at least, isn't structured to incentivize them to do it.