> There's too much emphasis on closing questions that are duplicates (when in fact they are not) This is a great point. And it also relates to abuse of power.

> There's too much emphasis on closing questions that are duplicates (when in fact they are not) This is a great point. And it also relates to abuse of power. Recently I raised a question without precedent on Stack Overflow. A person had given a detailed answer, which pointed to issues not available in documentation. His answer was in fact an expanded analysis of the overall language specs - without it, I had no idea how to debug my code. One megalomaniacal moderator marked my question as 'duplicate', and then pointed to another question -- where he claimed to have answered the question 'definitively' (he had not) and wanted me to upvote his answer. There was no way for me to challenge his 'duplicate' mark, which is a real loss for anyone else encountering the same issue as I did.