I've lost count of how many times I've googled a question, had the first hit be SO, and the top answer concisely explains how to solve my exact problem, often with several other alternatives in the other answers and a nuanced discussion about the tradeoffs between them.

Stack Overflow is like democracy. It sucks sometimes, but it's still better than everything else we've come up with so far.

I've lost track of the number of times that I've gone to a question that actually deals with what I'm looking for just to find that it's locked and marked duplicate of a completely different question. Complete pain in the ass.

Although I've encountered this as well, in most cases I got a useful answer for my problem.

I often ddg problems related to Ubuntu. I had many encounters where someone had the same problem than me on askubuntu, but the answers where unhelpful, sometimes only the question was posted with no answer at all. Or the original poster stated he solved his problem, without posting the solution. In most cases, on SO I found relief.

Yeah, the moderation there needs improvement. When ever I use it I almost have to spend as much time preempting invalid attempts to close my question as I do actually asking it.

Then there's also the conceit that SO has hit upon a definition of what a good technical question is (or, more specifically, what isn't a valuable technical question), and they stick to it despite any evidence to the contrary. I've seen questions that fail their over-restrictive criteria that have far better answers than many that do.

This is the worst and I see it often enough to want to respond to your gripe with support!

Quite a few times I’ve googled something only to hit SO answer as the first match where the accepted answer is my own... Oh, right...

For me, it's alway Jon Skeet or Stephen Cleary with a well-written, correct answer that highlights some gotcha that is incredibly non-obvious in the official documentation. Where these guys find the time, I don't know...

Unless it's something to do with Skype or Lync. Then it's abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

I'm not sure what you search for but that has never happened to me in about 7 years of searching.

You can always appeal to get a question re-opened. You can see who voted to close it and then send them a message.

The worst place for things getting closed is Skeptics SE, but that's a hotbed of controversy and the moderators on there deserve danger money.