@sorin does indeed have a point, especially about the personality pattern. Sometimes when there's a nice clean "right" answer that's well-accepted in the industry, the person with the most in-your-face answer tends to get the most upvotes. However, questions with several right-ish answers don't tend to attract the same number of upvotes, even though they are often more helpful than seeing a single "Here's what you should do" type of answer.

@ewwhite Which is precisely the type of question I asked. Or tried to - suggestions gratefully accepted for edits that would make this clearer.

I guess our main point of difference is that I don't consider the overall question a shopping question. I consider it a design question. serverfault.com/questions/575357/… seems much more shopping-centric in comparison. Perhaps I just need to improve my wording.

One thing that would help to reduce the burden of re-answering the same question is to provide a simple and intuitive way of merging or linking questions. If someone asks @ETL's stereotypical question about how to set up multiple web sites on a single server, and it's genuinely a duplicate, provide a way for it to be marked as a duplicate, and after a certain number of votes, any future references to the question get redirected. And the original poster gets notified where their answer lies.