Why are the values of upvotes for simple and complex questions equal?

Question

I found several very-close-to-duplicate questions/answers. However, I want to restate some questions and discuss the answers from these questions.

Here the questions which I found:

• Answering simple questions gets more points than complicated questions

• Noob questions, simple answers and big rep points

• How can we make SO reputation more realistic

• Shouldn't answering complex questions get more upvotes?

I find it quite unfair that super simple questions and their answers upvote give the same amount of reputation points per upvote as complex questions. I think reputation points should be much closer linked to contribution. And I think that contribution in answering/asking a simple question (both in time, value and time saved to other developers) is way less than for some more complex questions.

Why doesn't Stack Overflow change this?

I saw several common answers:

if you change the game, then the only result is that people will game it differently.

I agree only partly with this. Sure, people will always game the system. However, any improvement can be rejected based on this argument. I believe if there is an obvious problem, it makes sense to fix it. And it looks like this question was asked number of times (meaning that it's not only me thinking that it should be changed).

Reputation is NOTHING more than an INCENTIVE to contribute.

Again. I agree only partly. Reputation doesn't have any real value (it can't be converted to anything). However, let's be honest. People are competitive and people like to have some measurement stick and most of software developers want to have a fair game. Based on this, reputation isn't NOTHING, reputation is very important tool which makes Stack Overflow popular. Calculating reputation one way or another way may lure or discourage people from participating.

Esoteric questions are only of interest to people working with that item.

I believe one of the biggest values of Stack Overflow that it contains a lot of information which is hard to find somewhere else.

So, sure, there are some rare questions which aren't valuable to the whole community. But, I would say that a question which saves 25 people a day of work (complex question) is more valuable than a question which saves a 1000 people 3 minutes of googling (simple question).

My summary:

I believe it makes sense to change a system a little bit. The simplest way would be the ability to mark a question as trivial. If some number of people marked the question as trivial (let's say 10), all upvotes for this question/answers become less valuable (for example, 1 or 2 points, instead of 5). This will close this gap.

Answer 1

Questions which suffer from the bikeshed problem are most likely Not Constructive. Vote accordingly.

Some legitimate answers get more votes than others because:

1. The question gets more views, and
2. The answer is more easily verifiable as correct.

For the more obscure questions with well-thought-out answers, there are bounties available to reward folks who put in the hard work.