I love the implication that thousands of people, from a broad spectrum, who all had the same negative experiences with what was obviously a serious endemic problem with the site, all just needed to understand the policy better. That was clearly the issue.
If thousands of Americans travelled to a tiny country where cars drive on the left, and all tried to drive on the right as they do at home, would that make the country in the wrong? Would it be a "serious endemic problem" with the country?
Out of 10 times I asked for this, somebody replied with a link once. Most people do understand that they have violated the rules, they just don't agree with the rules.
If you knew how it worked, you would have understood that answering questions is only indirectly about "helping people", by hopefully building something that third parties can make use of later. The objective is not "the OP's problem was solved", but "the OP's question was answered" (which requires that there is a recognizable question extracted from analyzing the problem; and that there is one such question; and of course, those third parties are better served if they are all routed to the same place where the best answers are already written.)
If you were there to volunteer troubleshooting, or the programming equivalent of "tech support", you were in the wrong place. If you were interested in going back and forth with suggestions to help debug a program, you were in the wrong place. All of that is supposed to happen before the question is posted. The question is about why a specific thing works a specific way, or how to accomplish a specific atomic objective.
I believe the disconnect here is you're describing how some wanted it to work vs. how it played out in the real world. In practice, it became an unrewarding place to contribute high quality original content to.