I'm in that third group because I perceive SO as a 'no good deed goes unpunished' culture. I already went through that with Wikipedia, and I've got better things to do than fight insiders.

truestory. I've been doing this for 2 decades and I've only ever posted one question on SO because it was super obscure technical thing that was totally un-googleable. I know not to ask anything less obscure. For community and "normal" questions there's reddit. I also only answer questions on reddit. I know there's prestige and it's good resume material to answer on SO, but reddit is a community whereas SO is documentation. Answering on SO is too aggravating.

Except part of the problem is that it's not even doing a very good job of giving a good authoritative answer either.

In the earlier days, it was designed to straddle the line more with a wiki; there were "community wiki" questions and answers, but people couldn't get reputation for those, and if someone's question or answer was edited enough it would automatically converted to "community wiki". However, people would get upset about losing the potential karma, so that feature was taken away, and major edits to other people's answers that change the meaning of it started to be discouraged.

However, there's no way for anyone other the person who originally asked a question to change which answer is accepted. So if someone asked a question 10 years ago, and someone gave a bad answer or an answer that is now out of date but which was accepted, and those two people have now left the site, there's no good way to get the first answer to the question to be the correct one. You can write a better answer, and even if it's upvoted, there will still be the accepted answer ahead of it.

I've tried following the original, more wiki-like spirit of the site by editing such answers, and then gotten other people reverting me because the edit would "give reputation to someone who didn't deserve it."

I feel like the incentives, and balance, and community of the site are just off right now. It still serves a useful purpose, but it could be a lot better, but whenever I've tried making suggestions for how to improve, I've gotten so much pushback that I've just given up.

>it seems as though the single authoritative, comprehensive answers is what helps those people the most.

I'm in that group and the problem is Google results seem to favor the recent, locked and left unanswered question over the so-called authoritative one

I just realized that here we got a point where DuckDuckGo is actually way better than Google. Having it as default I never stumble over this problem and usually find a pretty relevant answer in top results.