How should the "very low quality" flag be used?

Question

On more than one occasion, across different sites of the network, I have raised the "very low quality" flag. Apparently, a few mods (it came out while discussing after the fact) are unaware that this flag comes with this text description

This question/answer has severe formatting or content problems. This question/answer is unlikely to be salvageable through editing and might need to be removed.

I try to use it in the spirit of this post:

the flagger thinks this post is beyond saving -- no amount of editing or polishing will turn this particular turd into gold

But nevertheless, sometimes my flags get declined with the following comment (that I understand is pre-packaged in the mod reviewing tools:

flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies or an altogether wrong answer

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I do not understand then: should I use this flag for "severe content problems" or not? What is a "severe content problem" that is not "an altogether wrong answer"?

To clarify:

• spam, well, it is flagged as spam
• gibberish is flagged as "rude/abusive"
• comments/follow up questions are flagged as "not an answer"

• if a post is merely technically wrong there is no correct flag type [...] The correct course of action is to downvote, not flag.

(the last is taken verbatim from Servy's comment)

What are "severe content problems" that are not covered from the above points? What remains to be flagged as "very low quality"?

Answer 1

The way I see it, there are three paths forward for this flag:

1. Remove the flag entirely.
2. Use it as a quality indicator for kicking things into the review queue, and completely hide it from moderators.
3. Change the nature or action that the flag represents.

Answer 2

The VLQ flag should be used for unrecognizable gibberish.

Posts that should be flagged as VLQ don't make any sense as a question or answer: it is not salvageable through editing. Every post that is human readable (it might still need extensive editing) can't be flagged as VLQ. It can be flagged as spam, abusive / offensive, not an answer, etc, if that does apply.

Don't use the VLQ flag for questions or answers that are not well-researched, unclear, or just plain wrong. A downvote and/or close vote in the case of a question will do then.

In your particular case the moderators apparently thought the post was just technically wrong, which, as said, doesn't warrant any flag. It is also possible that the flag was declined because you used had the wrong type, for example when you had an obvious spam post flagged as VLQ.