In response to your edits: I have a question about server-class software. The hardware and operating system in my problem do not matter. The problem clearly lies not with the hardware or the OS, but the server software - that software is what crashes. Second, the problem happens when I am in the role of a system administrator, installing my server software. Third, it doesn't matter if I'm installing to 1 computer or 1000 - this is clearly a system administration problem that is preventing me from getting my job as a software engineer done. I'm asking my question from one sysadmin to another.

You need to accept both groups of people. Apparently, more needs to be done to attract the more experienced system administrators (the advanced and expert groups), and that's not my concern - that's the job of the person Jeff and Joel appointed to oversee ServerFault and do what Jeff and Joel managed to do for StackOverflow. My concern is being able to ask my novice and intermediate system administration questions, getting answers, and learning. Right now, that's not happening. If StackOverflow can address everything from the students to the Jon Skeets, ServerFault can, and must, do so as well

I have two problems with the [beginner] tag. First, it adds no meaning to the question - there is no standard definition of what makes something a beginner question (although some are obvious). Second, how do you define other levels of difficulty (there's more than just beginner and non-beginner) and where do you draw the lines?

I don't like the concept of a beginner tag. Like you said, I could have 10 years of administrating Linux systems and then move to a Windows system. Also, "beginner" isn't a well-defined word (where do you draw the line between beginner, intermediate, and advanced?). It also has no semantic meaning - it doesn't doesn't describe the content of the question at all.

And by system administrator, I do hope you mean people who perform system administration tasks outside of work. I'm not trained or educated as a system administrator, but I run my own development servers and network for personal development and I feel I should be able to leverage and learn from this community of people. I'll never be any more than an novice or an intermediate in this field, but that doesn't mean I can't ask good questions and learn from people who are advanced or experts.

The way I see it, experts don't need the exchange. They already know most of what they need to know. The people who want to learn are the ones who need the exchange - the students, novices, and intermediates who want to become advanced or experts in a given field by interacting with and learning from those who are currently experts.

I just want to clarify that more: There are four groups of people that I've seen. The experts - the high-rep, core users (the "Jon Skeet"s of each exchange). The intermediates/advanceds - the middle rep users who make up the bulk of the regular users of an exchange. The novices - people who are in the process of learning the field, who typically answer more questions than provide answers but want to move up. The drive-bys - people who ask a few questions and move on. An Exchange should cater to the novices through experts - allowing people to collaborate regardless of skill level.

I disagree - I think that a Stack Exchange should be accessible to everyone with an interest in a particular area. Yes, you are going to have those questions that are of the expert level, but you also are going to have novice and intermediate questions. How else do you move up from a novice to an expert unless you can ask those questions? You don't. Joel's posting on that suggestion for lawyers is just wrong - sure, support the experts, but allow for well written, well thought out novice questions.

I'm also writing up an "answer" to that link. Thanks for that.

There's a difference between "developer support" and "a developer also administrating his/her own system". At work, I have system administrators to support me. At home, it's just me - I am the system administrator and if I have problems, I should be able to turn to other people who act in the system administrator capacity for help, instead of power users.

But the thing is, the target audience (and my guess is most users) of SuperUser is the home PC user who spends most of their time using a web browser, a word processor, email client, and a home-friendly OS. There might be a good number of power users and knowledgeable people. On the other hand, the target audience of ServerFault are people who, for a living, install, configure, and maintain servers, including MySQL Servers, including on developer machines such as my own. At work, if I have a problem with MySQL, I turn to the admin, even if it is on my development machine because he knows best.

Well, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get any answers on Super User, which is the biggest problem. What it all comes down to is "where are the people who know the answer". The people who frequent Super User aren't the kind of people who are running MySQL Servers on their machines. If I had a question about Word, PowerPoint, or my OS (with the exception of server OSes), Super User would be perfect. But if I get a single answer, I'd be extremely surprised.

That makes no sense to me. It doesn't matter where you deploy a MySQL server - it's still a server. I'm running a professional grade OS (Windows 7 Professional x64), a commercial-grade server software installation (MySQL Server), in a professional environment (my development machine as opposed to my gaming machine). To me, those are the three characteristics that you need for a question to be appropriate for Server Fault.