Surely the important goal here is the production of well-asked, well-answered questions.
Agreed.
So a follow-on question:
Are we producing well-asked & answered questions which are accessible to the public?
When I ask google to help me find the answer to a programming problem, google often directs me towards Stackoverflow. The quality of the first SO answer that google directs me to is often “good” (subjective opinion of mine). Sometimes google’s first SO answer is inadequate, but usually one of the next few SO answers is “good”. I suspect that google directs towards “good” SO answers because those answers are visited more often.
Anyway, my point is that google does a good job of filtering the “bad” questions out of SO requests.
In my experience, Yes… we produce well-asked & answered questions which are accessible to the public.
In spite of a great quantity of “unworthy” questions, SO “distributes” well-asked questions with answers.
Now more to your question.
Some SO questions show ineffective effort:
Homework where the well-asked question is really asked by the teacher without effort by the student,
Code copied from a blog post plus the question of “How can I do [whatever] with this blog code”
“Here’s my great idea, please do all the coding entirely for me”
On my more-patient days I comment the questioner requesting a better question. On my more-impatient days I vote to close the question.
There is one class of ineffective effort question that I take the time to answer:
“I’m new here and I have only a few reputation points and I want to learn how [whatever] works”.
Sometimes the questioner may not be far enough up the learning curve to even ask an effective question.
In this case, I don’t mind taking time to bring the learner up to speed with a well-answered response.
I personally believe that a second important goal is to give help to those who “intend” to put in effort but who can’t muster up a well-asked question. (“Help will always be granted here at Hogwarts for those who ask—and are willing to put in present or future effort”)
It seems to me that answering these type of "willing to learn" questions eventually helps SO by giving the inexperienced questioner a chance become an experienced answerer.