> Give people a chance to revise their question and respond to criticism

That's exactly what closure does.

This is a common misconception about question closing; that closure is the death of a question.  It is not.  The only thing that closure prevents is addition of new answers.  That's all.  People can still upvote, downvote, edit, comment, vote to open, vote to delete. They can participate in any way except to add new answers to a question that is not fully baked.

Even deletion is not the death of a question; three community members with 10K reputation can restore a deleted question by voting to undelete.

> Encourage being helpful rather than critical

We do.  In fact, that's what the Summer of Love is all about, despite efforts by several people to hijack that conversation for something else.

The problem is, we can't help the help vampires.  Many of the rules were put in place as general guidelines to dissuade those people, and unfortunately every time we make an exception in the name of being nice, the help vampires point to that exception and say that it's unfair that they can't ask their own crappy question because, after all, you allowed this guy to ask his.

A couple of years ago, Stack Overflow [was being inundated with extremely low-quality questions](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-prevent-some-of-the-low-quality-questions-from-entering-our-system).  I'm not exaggerating when I say that, had the automated filters that were put in place at the time not been implemented, Stack Overflow would have collapsed.  

I mention the automated filter, because it's illustrative of how mind-bendingly awful questions can really get.  There is a faith sometimes that people will always ask their questions in good faith, without being lazy.  That faith is misplaced; there is a large body of rotten questions that you will never see, since they are trapped by the filter.

Most people who debate the relative merits of shopping questions don't realize that the vast majority of these questions:

1.  Are too localized: the information rapidly gets out of date, and is never maintained.
2.  Are too vague: What's your favorite?
3.  Are honeypots for spam, thanks, me too, and other off-topic answers.
4.  Are bikesheds; everyone has an opinion.
5.  Are rep magnets; "I like jQuery, you should use that" is not a real answer, and getting 100 upvotes on such an answer distorts the value of reputation as a measure of community trust.

It takes no effort to write a list question; anyone can do it.  It's much harder to write a good, well-thought out question that demonstrates you've put in some effort to not only ask a question that might be useful to others, but also that you've put some effort into helping yourself first.

> Create the Stack Overflow Forum for those questions that cannot pass muster

Part of the reason that the Question and Answer format is so closely guarded is that it produces results.  

In the blog post, someone essentially said that hey, I could get my answer from a forum, why can't you be more like a forum?  Take a close look at those forum environments.  On reflection, have you found *any* of them really useful to you at all?  Can you count on the fingers of one hand the times when posting to a forum really gave you a timely, meaningful answer to your problem?

Recently, I googled *"Ford Taurus 2005 won't start when hot."*  Do you know how many matches there are?  One million, five hundred and sixty thousand.  Do you know how many of those matches actually impart useful information?  Exactly zero.  Well, zero in the first two dozen matches anyway.  

Why is this?  Because those matches go to forums, where dozens of people have posted the same question over and over again, and hundreds of people have posted countless useless answers to that question, including 

 - "I have the same problem, any idea?"
 - "Mine starts but I have this other
   problem."
 - "Mine always starts, I don't know
   what your problem is."
 - "Mine only starts at Disneyland."
 - ["I like turtles."][1]

And so on.

Stack Exchange is a known solution to a known problem.  The question and answer format is carefully crafted to encourage the posting of high-quality material.

The forum environment is exactly the opposite.  It is a vast wasteland of suck, promising everything, delivering nothing.  It is the Sahara desert, where you walk towards an oasis because you are dying of thirst, but it is just a mirage, and there's no water there.


  [1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93Y