[fragmede]

> never allowing questions with lots of upvotes to be closed

Don't make it never, just raise the threshold?

Make it require X moderators to agree before it can be closed.

Make it so that opinion answers don't get rep.

Make it so the questions are put on hold and go to meta stack overflow.

(I don't acctually use stack overflow; apologies if you already do that.)

The closing of popular questions by a mod on a drunken power-hungry semantics trip is to the exclusion of the community is very off-putting for the regular members of the community who do the majority of the answering.

[jackmaney]

And who determines which answer is an "opinion answer"? Any attempt at labeling answers as "opinion answers" via machine learning will inevitably have false positives.