Protecting questions is a privilege awarded at 3,500 reputation on you're average SE site (of course it's different here, because unlike most SE sites, Meta SE and Stack Overflow have different reputation requirements for privileges). After a question has been protected, it requires 10 reputation to answer. But what's the point? There are still hundreds of new users that have >10 reputation, and they can do very similar things to what the newest users do. And it's also a little unfair and useless.
What's the point?
Why is this a privilege?
If we had to keep it, should we raise the reputation required to answer a protected question?