Explaining a "better" way is great as an addendum to an answer for the actual problem asked. As you said, it can be very helpful to provide an out of the box solution.

However, it is very annoying when I ask a question and the only answers are some variant of, "you are doing it wrong." Multiple times I have had to write an explanation that is longer than my actual question to convince people that I actually do want an answer to the question I asked.

If you really think you understand my problem better than I do, based on a simplified explanation, awesome. I would love to hear a better way to go about what I am doing. But please, try to answer the actual question first (or at least say you don't know the answer). There is a slim chance the "better" way is not actually workable in the real world scenario.

I get those sorts of answers most often because the real problem is too complex to give as the example, and I simplify the example down to what's essential to my question. Then, there's often a better way to solve that particular example, which wasn't the goal. I often even put something in like "I know you could solve the problem in this example with X, and I'm not looking for those." And people will still say "Why are you doing it that way just do X". That gets pretty infuriating.