I think part of the issue is, well folks have a fundamental misunderstanding of the SE model - that Q&A works best when its low noise and objective. There's ONE answer, not a discussion, though sometimes there can be more than one approach to solving a problem. Its very hard to do subjective questions without very careful guard rails.
Sometimes I feel like some folks see a text input box, and assume that its a forum. We're not one, nor are we a place for 'general' long form writing like Wikipedia.
Historically we did allow recommendation questions of all sorts - There was an explicit ban on shopping questions and eventually folks decided that recommendation type question were about the same. You can still ask how to solve a problem, just not explicitly what with.
If you still don't agree with me, we could either create a separate site on each platform for opinion-based questions
We do have a pair of sites for product recommendations - with very strict rules needed to make things work. Additional sites need moderation and other resources, and as a former Software Recs moderator, its not as simple as "here's a site, go wild"
Picture this: Someone completely new to something and doesn't know about anything that he wants to do, so he heads over to any of the SE sites with that topic and asks for recommendations.
Well - there needs to be a first step or ten taken. We can't do all the legwork for someone. We can help them out when they stumble, or there's an elephant blocking the road, but they need to put in their work too.
If you know a chatroom well (and that's sometimes considered legwork too), you could talk out your problem but if you're just going there for that, people get grumpy.
As for duplicates - a valid duplicate points the poster and other people who find the question to the right answer.
I think it very much goes both ways - the model we have works well enough that people find value in it. If we loosened up that model, we're just a slightly more specialised and differently fragmented Quora or yahoo answers.
