I've never really thought about how contributors trying to avoid the XY problem really stands at odds with StackOverflow's mission of being a repository of answ

I've never really thought about how contributors trying to avoid the XY problem really stands at odds with StackOverflow's mission of being a repository of answers, rather than a helpdesk. Not all Ys present as X, and not all Xs are actually Ys. Sometimes its an XZ problem. The best you can hope for is some answer down the page that says something like "to answer the actual question..."