Do you have any example 400+ upvoted questions you can point to that aren't of the type "everybody bring out all the snippets you've been saving, this time we're putting on a show"?
It's not complicated: questions and answers. This is common in sitebuilding though: "so unique we are." Well, at the end of the day it's just posts and comments, so quit milkin' it. A question that receives answers fits, I don't know how you could say otherwise.
However, this is all just a nice example of NIH Syndrome on SO's part, since these are lessons that have been learned by anybody who's hung out in a large IRC channel with kick/ban bots and arrogant ops, as well as being practiced on a web level for over 10 years by the likes of Metafilter.
It also reads to me like they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the community part without the humanity, since people's irrelevancies in questions fall into more than the 6 (or however many) preset reasons for closure. This may be an incontrovertible attribute of SO: their "model" (as criticized above) does not allow for the community, "topical identity" if you will, they are seeking to impose themselves,.
Yeah, if you're trying to re-create Yahoo! Answers.