This: Your goal is to build a classifier that predicts whether or not a question will be closed given the question as submitted.
"In a perfect world, we'd be able to offer specific, targetted guidance for authors whose posts were likely to be shot down, before they ever showed up on the site, and without requiring as much up-front effort from our community."
Which is waaaaay before the classification line.
How is that not replacing moderators [in part] with "bots"?
The problem right now is that the user mostly has very little opportunity to improve his question, because most of the time it has already been closed, and has very little chance of getting opened again (unless the question is flagged for moderator attention).