I had been waiting to see how things progressed before posting to meta (it might not have been necessary at all), but since the question has been raised I will attempt to defend my position.
To start with, I feel that [code-golf] is not within the strict bounds of what is appropriate on Stack Overflow. Simply put: it is a contest, not a question.
That said, I like code-golf and I participate from time to time. These events are fun, and they provide an chance to build a sense of community. Which is why I have never voted to close them in the past.
But two things that have happened recently that concern me:
They are coming at a higher rate. Once a week is not distracting, but the last week has seen five (counting from Code golf: Reverse quine to Code Golf: Email Address Validation without Regular Expressions), and the week before that saw three. As we've seen with other classes of off-topic-but-tolerated fun (like Best [Joke|Comic|...]) new users will notice these and will form the wrong impression about what is acceptable here, will send us more inappropriate "questions", and then they will come to meta hurt and confused if we close their work: not good for anyone.
Some of the recent ones have been asked by low rep users, and feel a lot like the OP was casting about for something to let them post, seized on code golf, and promptly posted a slight modification of an existing [code-golf]. Worse they failed to make it CW.
Hopefully this is a statistical fluctuation, and it will just pass.
But if these things turn into a nuisance, then they should be treated as such.
BTW, Liran Nuna, I felt that the Morse Code problem was a really fine example of the genre. It had a couple of obvious but long approaches, and at least three(!) subtle, more compact ways to attack it. Fun and enlightening.