Really? You mean you could memorize a blog post for random languages, go into an interview and answer a question and not completely fall apart from follow up question 1, 2, n?...

You make it sound like I'm asking this question, getting a monologue response and just moving on. These questions facilitate a dialogue between interviewer and interviewee, which quickly reveals your deeper understanding of a subject.

Now, I think your above approach (lookup, memorize, pretend) works great for the kind of technical interview questions that I've been refuting this whole time.

Finally, I don't think my questions are perfect, nor do I think the interview process in general is that great. I think the best way to find talent is to do a trial run for 1 - 2 weeks and see how good they are at taking fuzzy problems and breaking them down into actionable steps, then executing. This is regrettably hard to do for most people and companies.

How do you get people to do a trial run for a week or two?

Most people start looking for the next job when they are already doing their current one. So how can we ask them to do a trial run for a week or two?

Also what about the remuneration(what kind should be given if at all for this period) and does this work for freshers and absolute newbies too?

To me, this is the crux of why I agree with you, rather than the questions themselves. Anyone can rehearse an answer to any question, but a dialogue needs to be created in order to actually find out anything about a prospective hire's competencies.

To be useful, an interview needs to be a conversation, not a monologue.

Except even if you could get someone to do that it doesn't filter for the right candidates. Someone who can quickly get up to speed in a foreign domain is not the same skill as being able to build great systems/code/etc in a domain you're familiar with. The day to day of a programmer after the first X months if the latter and not the former.

Plenty of people can do both or can change from one to another. But it still seems to be that the interview focus should be different as both positions require somewhat different focus.

I don't mind interview having also part where code is written at all. Be it dummy feature or breadth/depth first search or fizzbuzz or any other simple reasonably sized assignment. But in case of senior as in partly decision maker with not much direct supervision in the long term, you need those other capabilities too.