SO aims at a simple Q&A format. I wonder why people expect it to yield "great" questions. A lot of actually fruitful topics are closed for provoking discussion.

   "... as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam.   Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it."

Stackoverflow is not an intellectual forum, its a simple question-and-answer database with debate being discouraged, and a very limited space for the kind of questions allowed. This is by design and its great, because finally when asking a question on XML, you are NOT bothered with people starting to discuss whether XML is actually a thing worth considering. But its the same _beneficial_ rules, that in the long run lead to a plattform where people just paste in their error messages and expect other people to dive through those.