I am pleased with the current changes. From the day one, I was advocating for using the same Q/A format as regular questions for this kind of content and the ability to easily move questions between sections.
In my time here as a regular user and now as a moderator, I have cast close votes on many questions (over 50K), I handled flags and curated Discussions and new Opinion based content. I am rather familiar with all kinds of good and bad content we will be seeing.
Considering that Stack Overflow traffic is rather low, and we still have plenty of curators, I do think we are in pretty good position to broaden the scope of Stack Overflow for programming related questions and define what kind of posts work and what kind of posts don't work well.
To all curators, I would like to ask you to give this content expansion a chance. This means if you are not sure about whether something fits or not, let it be. Ask for clarifications and add guidance instead of just closing. Don't cast delete votes immediately unless the question is outright nonsense. There will be plenty of poor and garbage posts that will need to be cleaned up. Please focus on those first, try to polish and fix the ones which have attracted good answers. Go to Meta if you think there is a need to discuss particular kind of questions and whether they are acceptable or not.
I know that there is still plenty of work ahead of us in defining what works and what doesn't. We did have a sneak peek preview of what kind of posts don't work well, but there were also some which produced good answers.
Over the years I have seen plenty of programming related questions which were closed as they were considered inappropriate for Stack Overflow. At the same time, many times I have found a good suggestions and solutions in answers to such questions. I see this as an opportunity to revive some of the old, high quality content which fits into the new rules and getting solutions for problems which would otherwise be out of scope for Stack Overflow.
If you need to ask about some tooling recommendation or have some programming related problem which doesn't fit into existing, rather narrow guidance of what is allowed, what better place you could possibly have to get good, answers from the actual experts in their fields.
Of course, we do want quality, and we do want good answers to such questions, not low quality one liners. We also want to have good questions which can be answered. Even opinion based and tooling recommendation questions can be too vague to answer and can lack details.
When it comes to the reputation, I know that many people will not look fondly at the current setup where open ended questions and their answers will also earn reputation. I have thought about it for a long time, and having equal reputation rules is the only simple and viable way to incorporate this content into the site with the ability to easily move (retag) questions without causing too much friction and have problems with the system abuse.
If we focus on quality, especially answer quality, reputation should not become a problem. After all, good answers deserve reputation regardless where they are posted. And it is not like we never had simple questions earning plenty of reputation for their askers on the regular Q/A. In that regard open ended questions are not too much different from the ones we allowed so far.
