The biggest blocker to this is that the site itself did not provide ways for the community to fix the front matter, and the site ownership ignored pleas to fix that front matter and to take more action to make people read it before participating.

There's also a huge problem that people equate popularity with success. It's the same phenomenon that leads people to declare the site "dead" (or not) based on the rate of new incoming questions. No; it's dead because the site management pushes ever more AI involvement that fights against the policy forbidding AIGC in questions and answers; and because they're destroying the core principles of participation in the site in the hope of making that question rate go up again (while ignoring the voices of those who would otherwise answer those questions).

> but that is also why it came off as hostile when you subsequently collected down votes even after passing through this filter

Questions only really had downvotes because they went into a public queue immediately and that was the mechanism to hide low quality content. It is not a problem to ask a duplicate and fail to recognize it; someone closing your question as a duplicate is helping you get a cached answer immediately, while also helping make that answer easier to find in the future. Anyone who downvoted a question merely because it was a duplicate was misunderstanding the system. On the other hand, getting through that filter, and even if you had a genuinely new question, doesn't mean you had a good question.

It should never have worked like that; this was counterproductive to the site's stated goals (but it was what the founders came up with, and doing it the right way would have killed engagement right out of the gate). What you really want is for the question to start out effectively closed, in a state where it can be workshopped, without the voting system. Anything that made it through that system would, in theory, never attract downvotes because the legitimate reasons to downvote it would have been addressed already. And by doing it that way, you limit exposure to the question to people who are interested in fixing questions, and let the people interested in answering questions have their own feed. (Of course, people can also wear multiple hats, but you get the idea.)

In fact, we had something like that for a little while, called the Staging Ground. It was, in my view, the only good idea the company had after the Prosus acquisition, in a sea of bad ones. It was not perfect, but it was a damn sight better than the traditional system.

They were incorrect to take the approach that they did.

Last year, my friend's cat died. Imagine if he had gone to Wikipedia to edit the page for Cat, inserting his question in the page text, seeking veterinary advice. I hope you would agree that this would be an abuse of the system which should certainly not be rewarded.

Similarly, on a Q&A site like Stack Overflow when you ask a question, it is simply expected that you think about other people, and what their needs will be.

Specifically: a question and answer are added primarily so that, indefinitely into the future, other people can find them with a search engine, read the question and confirm that it matches what they're trying to find out, and go to the answers. Think about what those users would want the question and answer to look like. Think about whether they would ever be able to find the question with reasonable search terms, and whether an answer to you could possibly also answer them. Think about whether they would expect Stack Overflow to house that question. This is, really, at the root of all the reasons for closing a question.