If that's SO's goal then I would say they've left a big hole in their strategy for a competitor.

That goal sounds good in principle. In practice, very specific programming questions often (if not usually) have multiple correct answers, with the best choice for a particular scenario being made by evaluating pros/cons just like the question I referred to. Some languages embrace multiple ways of doing things. For example, Perl's motto is "there's more than one way to do it".

The "competitor" is Programmers.SE: the other site of the same network for more subjective, high level QA.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/

It kind of annoys me that we've got all these "kind-of, sort-of" related stack exchange sites for programming and whether one question belongs on Stack Overflow, or Programmers.SE or cstheory.SE or whatever is often quite hit-and-miss.

But then, on the other hand, you have tags on Stack Overflow that are almost separate sites in and of themselves. Usually this happens when companies start using Stack Overflow as the defacto support forum for their product (a lot of Google stuff uses this, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-apps-script or http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android etc)

Thanks. SO should change their FAQ if they want questions like the one in the OP to go to this other site instead. Looking at http://stackoverflow.com/faq, the question is (to me) on-topic for SO. It's not good enough to just have a "competitor" that's a better fit for the question.