What should a good tooling-recommendations question have?

This is a follow-up to recent posts about the new open-ended question tags. Before jumping to answer, please read the answering guidelines below. I would like us to come up with objective numbers, so answer scope and voting is important.

First, a primer on the current tooling-recommendations tag wiki:

Questions where a user is looking for suggestions or guidance on software, libraries, IDEs, or other development tools. The question should be more than simply "what is the best X?" It should include detailed context, such as the specific project constraints, requirements, and the "why" behind potential tool choices.

Right now, that's all we've got. We, the community, didn't have much say in this initial description, but we are being encouraged to come up with our own guidelines. I am choosing the tooling-recommendations tag first because it seems smallest in scope, so it feels like a natural testbed for this approach.

The goal of this post is to identify the aspects of a good tooling recommendations question in a way that showcases the relative importance of each aspect. Answer scope and voting is important to make this effective.

I define an "aspect" of a question to generally be:

• The subject of the question.
• What information should go in the post title.
• What information should be in a question body.
• What information should be in an answer.
• The kinds of answers a post will attract.
• Voting behavior.
• Closing and reopening behavior.
• How the question should be tagged.
• How the community should treat the asker and answerers.
• The scope or breadth of the question.
• How to handle posts that might be on-topic in other Stack Exchange communities.
• Or

This is not an exhaustive list. The community is welcome to interpret "aspect of a question" as anything they feel relevant.

Answering Guidelines

The goal of answering is to give the community distinct aspects of tooling recommentation questions to vote on. Answers must be limited in scope so votes up or down can provide a clear signal about what we want and don't want in these kinds of posts.

A good answer should:

• Focus on a single aspect you want to see in a tooling recommendation question[1].
• Define what the aspect is, and why you feel it should be supported.
• Not duplicate another aspect because it dilutes community votes. Consider voting on the existing answer, or editing an existing answer to address issues with its content.
• If you want, provide examples of the aspect, or links to other posts and/or answers in support of your position.
• Regarding questions which might be on-topic in other communities:
  • Focus your answer on one such community.
  • Also include guidance on how the community should handle such questions, such as closing, voting, and commenting.

[1] I will provide one answer that states, "I do not want tooling recommendation questions supported," because I know this whole experiment has been divisive. I understand such sentiment exists, and I think it's important to provide those people a way to signal their discontent in total. If you are one of those people, up-vote that answer; down-vote all the others, if you feel inclined.

Voting Guidelines

The goal of voting on answers is allow consensus about this topic to surface; this information should (hopefully) guide updates to the tooling-recommendations tag wiki, and help guide the community when asking and answering such questions.

• Votes on answers are an expression of your opinion: agreement (up-vote) or disagreement (down-vote). Like them all? Up-vote all answers. Hate them all? Down-vote all of them. Have mixed feelings? Vote answers up or down as you please.
• Vote for as many answers as you want. It's multiple choice without an "all of the above" option (except the "I do not want tooling recommendations" answer, which is a "none of the above" option).
• Votes on this question: I haven't the foggiest clue how to interpret them quite yet. It's the votes on answers that should be most informative. Maybe "yay tooling recommendations!" (up-vote my post) or "boo tooling recommendations" (down-vote my post).
• Serial down-voting or up-voting: I'm not sure if serial voting is detected on meta, but from my own perspective, I wouldn't consider this to be a bad thing, whether the votes are up or down.

Scoring Answers

The sum total of votes won't be as informative as much as the split between up and down votes. For example, an answer with zero votes where nobody voted the answer up or down is not directly comparable to another zero-score answer with 25 up-votes and 25 down-votes. The total number of votes on an answer are also informative.

Beyond that, I'm not sure how to interpret the final scores; I think that should be the subject of a follow-up question.

My Own Biases

I do not work for the company that owns and operates Stack Overflow, nor would I consider myself to be a fanboy, but I am sympathetic to the plight of the company (and therefore this community and the knowledgebase we've built). I've been much more active on Software Engineering for the past 13 years, but Stack Overflow has always been one of my favorite haunts.

I am in favor of open-ended questions. I would like to see us support them with the proper guidelines and curation tools without things devolving to Reddit-levels of insanity.

In Summary

What aspects of tooling-recommendations questions make for a good post?