I think people want the ability to do both, but there was a huge need for a better way to answer objective questions. In the pre-SO world, forums and bulletin

I think people want the ability to do both, but there was a huge need for a better way to answer objective questions. In the pre-SO world, forums and bulletin boards served subjective questions mediocrely, but objective question abysmally. Solving the objective question problem is and always has been SO's mission. It's a hard problem, and they solved it well- at least partially by firmly avoiding discussion questions. So, while I think there's totally room and a need for a better solution to discussion questions (and there are several active attempts: discourse, slate, quora, etc), I hardly see it as a fault of SO's that they pushed away subjective questions.