An idea I had based on Mystical's comment; age close votes after a certain (large) number of Not Sure "votes".

Why? Because close vote aging is supposed to happen when lots of people look at a post and don't feel strongly enough to close. If a question gets 20 "meh"/not sure reviews, IMO that's as good a reason to start aging close votes as 100 views (the current requirement) because those are 20 people who could have voted.  (number is totally a arbitrary suggestion)

The threshold should be higher than Do Not Close, but I notice I cast a lot of "Not Sure" in the close vote list. If a lot of people review the post and no one is really sure what to do, maybe that's a sign it's just not close-worthy.

However I also think this needs to coincide with more strictly showing people close votes on questions in their interest areas, or only allow "aging" from Not Sure "votes" from people who have earned rep in the question's tags. I'm thinking a lot of people might just think "Javascript? I don't know that mess. not sure"

I don't want to just arbitrarily knock stuff out of the queue, but this thick grey area seems to be a huge problem, and at some point all these grey area posts make it harder to review the actual these need closing/not closing posts. Knocking out the grey area posts allows the queue to dwindle faster and people can instead focus on new posts that clearly need close, not old posts no one has opinions on.

Could any devs share some stats on how common "Not Sure" is as a review choice in Close votes, and maybe some breakdown of how many "not sure"s posts that go unclosed tend to accumulate over time?

An idea I had based on Mystical's comment; age close votes after a certain (large) number of Not Sure "votes".

Why? Because close vote aging is supposed to happen when lots of people look at a post and don't feel strongly enough to close. If a question gets 20 "meh"/"not sure" reviews, IMO that's as good a reason to start aging close votes as 100 views (the current requirement) because those are 20 people who could have voted. (The number is a totally arbitrary suggestion.)

The threshold should be higher than Do Not Close, but I notice I cast a lot of "Not Sure" in the close vote list. If a lot of people review the post and no one is really sure what to do, maybe that's a sign it's just not close-worthy.

However I also think this needs to coincide with more strictly showing people close votes on questions in their interest areas, or only allow "aging" from Not Sure "votes" from people who have earned rep in the question's tags. I'm thinking a lot of people might just think "Javascript? I don't know that mess. not sure"

I don't want to just arbitrarily knock stuff out of the queue, but this thick grey area seems to be a huge problem, and at some point all these grey area posts make it harder to review the actual these need closing/not closing posts. Knocking out the grey area posts allows the queue to dwindle faster and people can instead focus on new posts that clearly need close, not old posts no one has opinions on.

Could any devs share some stats on how common "Not Sure" is as a review choice in Close votes, and maybe some breakdown of how many "not sure"s posts that go unclosed tend to accumulate over time?