I understand that the criteria for most badges and hats are designed to encourage positive actions that are constructive to Stack Exchange sites.
The criteria for the I’ll Handle It hat is:
vote to close a question, edit it from closed, vote to reopen
Since I can edit a question when it's open and leave it open, why encourage users to close it just to edit it from closed and reopen it again? Just curious about the rationale behind this criteria.
This hat existed last year as a secret hat with the name 180°. As that name suggests, it's about changing your mind. The idea is that after closing the question, you realize that it may be salvageable if someone just spends a bit of time editing it to make it better. And since you want the hat, you'll handle it.
Consider this situation:
There's a question that needs more work by OP. For example MCVE is missing -> only OP can add that in an edit -> so you vote to close.
OP makes the necessary changes (adds the MCVE), so technically the question can be reopened...
...but it's written in a crappy way, poorly worded and formatted, so you edit to make some improvements, and then you vote to reopen.
I think this is a pretty common situation, not an artificial example. And it's a perfectly legit way to get the hat!
Also note that it's perfectly reasonable to wait for the user's edit before further improving the question. If OP never makes the edit, then the post may never be eligible to reopen, so there's no point trying to improve it.
A missing MCVE is just one example. On Code Review, sometimes users post broken code, which is off-topic, but often fixable. Or OP has working code, but instead of including it in the question, OP just links to an off-site resource. We cannot copy-paste ourselves into the question, because posting the content on Stack Exchange implies consent to the site license, so it really has to be the OP to do that. Once the post is fixed, it can be reopened.
Surely there are many other examples that could trigger the above legitimate sequence of events.
Hats are not badges. Some of them exist more for fun than for really encouraging good behavior.
The requirement that the question will be closed first makes it much harder to get the hat, so the hat hunters need to work harder to get it.
It's not encouraging any bad actions, so I don't see any issue with this.
The way I see it there are only two ways of tackling a poorly written question:
If a question is too subjective, broad or poorly written it should be edited.
If a question can not be salvaged in any possible way it should be closed or even deleted.
If I already know I can improve the question by editing it, why would I bother closing the question before and re-opening it after?
