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For example, look at Should I be able to cancel my up-vote on a comment?
This has a lot of support from the community, but is status-declined with no explanation.
It just brings back the memories of being a child whose babysitter doesn't know a thing about parenting, and just says things like "NO, end of discussion.". "But why?...", you ask? "Because I said so!" - or just silence, like we get here.
Reasonable people need reasons to remain reasonable!
Your example question is pretty nice in that there are at least two dissenting opinions already:
So this is nothing like "Because I said so" it's more like, "After reviewing the pros and cons, we are choosing not to implement the feature."
But even if this were not the case requiring stack overflow internet services, inc to justify every decision they made is ridiculous. At some point a decision has to be made, and if they provide justification, someone will object to their justification and request further justification.
In other words, at some point users are still going to be dissatisfied with the answer - it doesn't matter that the dissatisfaction comes earlier in the process.
Further, it shouldn't be required for many of the same reasons moderators are not required to post a comment when they vote to close a question - check out those discussions for more reasons.
Lastly, the company should not bind itself to this feature request (to justify every status-declined) for legal reasons, so this feature request is dead from the very start.
