The real crux of my frustration is that I posted my question, whether formatted correctly or not, and immediately got a downvote. At like 1am in the middle of the night. Trolls? Within a couple hours the question had been both improved and put on hold. By dawn - when most of the rpgSE users would be seeing the question - it was no longer able to be answered.

I have a problem with overzealous or trollish voters sabotaging my question before it can be improved, by me or someone else. That is not a good way to manage the site.

And the fact that it accumulated so much off-topic discussion is precisely ** because** it got put on hold. Some people thought my question was irrelevant to the site; others wanted to put an answer. How long was it open? 2 hours? 4 hours? All I know is that the next time I saw it (about 8 hours later) it was effectively scrubbed.

@JohnDallman - I am interested in the information you offered, and I have read the links you suggested. Very informative. Unfortunately, if my question doesn't get reopened then there is no incentive for you to spend more time on this. Even if I find a better way to pose the question, and create another post, the same trolls may get it flagged again. If rpgSE is not the best platform for my question, then you can go over to Quora where I've posted a much shorter version of the same exact thing.

I think these kinds of questions are great mind openers, and I'd love to join the discussion. But I also agree that the Stack format is definitely inappropriate for open ended discussion, argument, and opinion. Chat here could be an alternative but it is too loose and freeform. Maybe we need some official forum-like discussion platform for the RPG.SE community for exactly these kinds of things.