Are Questions of the form "Why isn't XXX more common" off-topic?

Question

Today someone posted this question of the form "Why isn't XXX more common?" I know we tend to be more permissive than StackOverflow about questions that do not lend themselves to objective answers, but is this kind of question too subjective even for SQA?

Answer 1

It's a tough call, but I'm actually going to lean on the side of allowing it, but with caution. The reason I say this is because you have people with significant amounts of history in the field and know the relative strengths and weaknesses of products and methodologies.

For example, imagine a question on programmers.stackexchange where someone would ask "Why isn't Waterfall more common?" People would immediately cite the problems with it and it would probably be allowed. On Super User, you'd probably be fine with a question like "Why isn't Real Player more common?" After all it was king of the market, but now you hardly ever see it.

The reason I say it's a tough call is because I feel it's a question that lends itself to opinion over objectivity. Someone may have had a bad experience with a particular product and give an answer like "Because it sucks" or "Because it lacks features" or something like that, and that doesn't help the community.

But if you understand the real history why something isn't popular, you might say "Hey, the reason why it's not popular doesn't exactly apply to my firm... we can check this one out". I imagine this might help future users who are doing web searches to research potential solutions for their company.