@IsaacMoses Note this comment from Double AA which I incorporated in an edit) which I think might address your primary concern:

I think eliminating any vestige of conceptual overlap between posts is not a worthwhile goal. I think if someone asks "may one eat Doritos," editing in disclaimers to the question excluding cases where pikuach nefesh, hafsed meruba, kavod haberiyot, etc. may come into play is unhelpful, regardless of what other questions are subsequently posted.

There are going to be questions with overlapping concerns where some answers to one question are in conflict with some answers to the other question. This is inevitable, even if all legtitmate dupes are eliminated. It presents an arbitrage opportunity to the enterprising Yodeyan, to adapt the sources in one post that are missing in answers to the other and post a new.answer

I think it's downright unreasonable to ask the person with the question about medical rabbits to try to get it answered by placing a bounty on the question about rabbit Kashrut. That's not making it harder to get the medical question answered; it's making it essentially impossible.

@Alex yes...

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@IsaacMoses There would still be a lot of conceptual overlap in my system. I'm only eliminating one subcategory of conceptual overlap. Consider my example of apples and oranges above. If asked as two separate questions you could answer one of them and simply copy and paste your answer word for word to the other one. That's 100% conceptual overlap, yet still not a duplicate according to my approach.

For you Doritos example, I would say that it's better to have one (or a couple if necessary) post about about suspension of kashrut rules in exceptional cases.

Otherwise, we could have infinite questions: 1. Doritos and hefsed merubah 2. potatoes and hefsed merubah 3. sour sticks and hefsed merubah etc.

@Alex If we were in the business of writing an encyclopedia, it would make sense to design such posts and divvy up relevant information neatly between them, but we're not.

Also, how often would a situation such as the medical rabbit question come up? If it never happens, then it's not such a terrible theoretical consequence.

In any case, I might agree with the following:

If the second question references the first question it might not be a duplicate even without editing the first question.

Because once the second question references the first question, Goals #1 and #2 will be largely accounted for.

@Alex According to me, each of those posts would have to present a reasonable basis for expecting that there could be a relevant distinction between itself and the prior posts covering an apparently-similar question, or (depending the the particular concepts we're actually mixing here) at least a reasonable basis for expecting that the two concepts conflated are reasonable to address together (as we'll sometimes otherwise pare down over-complex scenarios into their non-interacting parts).

That should effectively bound the specific-food-hefsed-meruba-space that ends up with open questions.

@IsaacMoses Ah, so your approach is actually stricter than mine.

@Alex Not sure if I'd require it for de-duping, but I wouldn't be above unilaterally editing in the cross-reference, in any case

@IsaacMoses Well the cross-reference is necessary to prevent wholesale reproduction of content. If you ask your question about rabbits for a medical situation, it is likely that 90% of the answer will be addressing rabbits in general.

If it's cross-referenced, then the 90% doesn't need to be repeated.

@Alex OK, yes. I agree. In this case, we could require the question to start with "given that rabbits are generally assur, as indicated here."

And then if an enterprising answerer wants to disagree with the "Rabbits are generally assur" they can go right to the original question and post their disagreement there, thus upholding Goal #2.

@DoubleAA Kehilchosoh

@Alex ... and if it's controversial whether rabbits are assur or not, the new question could start with "according to those who say that ..."

However, there would be situations in which the interaction between the elements is not so cleanly divided, and there will end up being conceptual overlap in the answers.

I was having trouble constructing one, but then, this guy was kind enough to supply one:

It's not just "is eating dairy within six hours of meat allowed" plus "may one eat to avoid a B"L"? It's the interaction between these two concepts. (At first glance, it's not obvious to me what the answer is, when we're talking about violating one's minhag on a derabanan vs. resorting to Baruch Shem to avoid a B"L.)

That said, cross-referencing is certainly indicated here.

But if we already had a question "What should one do if he made a beracha on something he is not allowed to eat?" would you say that this is a duplicate?