By and large, the mod team on Server Fault does not "mod hammer" questions, despite our constant joking about it in chat.  We certainly do not do so to questions with a large proportion of upvotes (though we may mercy-kill something racking up infinite downvotes).

We have a contingent of active users with the [Vote To Close privilege][1], and many of them use it. Sometimes it is used a bit overzealously, but generally it's used fairly judiciously.  
You've been around long enough to know that most of those users hang out [in chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/127/the-comms-room), along with pretty much the entire mod team.  If you see things getting closed too aggressively feel free to knock heads together (or until you hit the reopen rep mark flag them and we'll knock heads for you).

***

The broader question of whether we should allow "open-ended" questions on the site is a good one.

I for one have no problem with design/architecture/best practice questions **stemming from thorough research and practical concerns** -- there may be no One True Answer to these questions, but the collection of answers they accumulate can serve as a valuable community resource (for example, [our canonical question about compromised servers][2] has many answers, each of which contributes something useful though no single answer is comprehensive).

Open-Ended questions [that are "Good Subjective"][3] also tend to be deeper questions, more likely to attract quality users and produce a useful pool of knowledge that will then bring in even more (hopefully high-quality) talent.  
We certainly don't want to become an Experts-Exchange or Yahoo Answers style "do my work for me" site with one-liners answering relatively trivial (or even esoteric) questions -- Depth and context in the discussion of any issue is something Server Fault should always be looking for.




  [1]: http://serverfault.com/privileges/close-questions
  [2]: http://serverfault.com/questions/218005/how-do-i-deal-with-a-compromised-server
  [3]: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/