There should be a way to shift an open ended question into a meta and link to it from the main site, or at least have it come up in searches there. Or maybe Stack Exchange is just too inflexible and a new platform is needed.
Take this question on Stack Overflow for example (the specifics of the question aren't important): What NoSQL...; at the time of this post it had 456 up-votes, 228 stars, and a cumulative 138+ up-votes for comments stating that the question should be reopened.
Additionally, the comments are full of people talking about how useful the question is, but it was closed because "...[it] is not a good fit for our Q&A format...".
Obviously it's a question people are interested in, and it would seem that there should be some why that the SE network would support them (chat isn't it). I originally thought meta, but that got me a whole lot of down votes, so clearly that isn't it.
Still, not having something like this makes SE a lot less useful, because these types of closures happen all the time for questions that people are interested in.