I left Quora in 2014, but your first statement feels very true to me. I can't say what they did after I left, but I saw a clear willingness to have a fuzzy interpretation of the rules for power users.
There was a time when Quora would bend over backwards to have one person from NASA write answers. I felt that wasn't really a great strategy. I always felt it would be much more valuable to have 1000 NASA employees write their best answer, and to find a way to make that happen.
This clearly didn't happen, as the one person from NASA who wrote thousands of answers is still a very active.
Full disclosure: I deleted my entire account, questions (>100), answers (>1000), and edits (>100,000) in rage in around 2015, mainly because I'm immature, but partly because I didn't want Quora to have what I made after I left. Also, I created a new account, because I wanted to feel it out to see how it was now, in case someone comes looking :P
Right now the system seems to be breaking rules that hurt writers and readers alike, with no discernible benefit other than creating tons of ad inventory and SEO inbound traffic.
There's also seemingly no effort spent on stopping spam even with blatant examples reported many times. It's crazy to see questions get paid thousands while being a Top Writer means I get the opportunity to buy their merchandise.
Granted, most of these posts are early 2017 and earlier.
Not to mention, the abundance of dirt quality content and insincere questions (and answers)
Everything after the comma explains why Quora is junk.
Now they removed descriptions from questions, hide comments by default, so they are heading the same direction.
Stackoverflow is helpful as documentation with examples, but for engineering problems is of no help anymore. I usually have to ask in some dev chats and discuss there
They break all of their own rules for the sake of clicks. I was a Top Writer there for two years. I finally got sick of trying to write informative high-quality answers only to see them buried beneath flippant image-heavy crap (rules violation #1) that didn't even get one tenth as many upvotes (rules violation #2). Then they started getting on my case for not having topic bios, even though other people's were blatantly false, for not responding nicely when their favorites were being dicks in comments, etc. So I just quit cold turkey and haven't posted since. I only go back to read sometimes when I'm super bored, and that's about it.