I think SE is awesome in spite of its rules, not because of them. The whole "discussion is bad mmkay" thing seems to be cargo-culted by the staff of these sites despite many examples to the contrary.
This has actually been my #1 appalling thing about Quora. The questions being asked on it are so often such a low quality that I worry about if I'm getting in to some sort of intellectual ghetto. Consequently, I rarely want Quora to tell anybody that I was on that website. I have also developed perception that people very active on Quora have fairly low bar (note that there are many tech celebrities on it but they are usually one-offs).
Examples from current Quora frontpage:
"How do people who have been affected by "Bendgate" feel about it?"
"Why am I so scared to ask for help?"
"I'm switching from this programming language to that programming language; what are the important gotchas?"