"Except, it does work. I've found many closed opinion questions to be just the info I was looking for."

Same for me. I think it is not wise to expect your users to be that fanatics, that they can't recommend any tool, without starting a flame war all the time. I mean there certainly are fanatics on the internet who fight with religious passion about the weirdest things, but I believe they are not the majority.

So just banning something that might cause trouble, but loosing all the benefits, I think was not a good decision.

But apart from that, I found lots of help on SO. But like others, not so much anymore, but mostly simply because I rarely need to look up things and the problems I do have are too obscure, for the main users, which are the target group, so I solve them by other means.