This is a follow-up question to What is our criteria for deciding opinion-based questions? Are they applied consistently?. I find some highly voted questions on this site that break the guidelines plainly.
Examples:-
Opinion-based: How to play against little kids?, Can I improve my chess? Or am I too old?, What is the earliest possible age to start teaching children how to play chess?, Why is stalemate a draw?, How do I learn to understand the middlegame?
(simply check the list of most voted questions to see more!)
Off-topic: How should I make a 6 year old think more?
Low-effort question (i.e., no search for an answer before asking the question): When is castling possible?
So, what are the actual criteria employed to decide whether a question is acceptable on this site?
I understand that mods allow some questions that break the guidelines because they think the community here appreciates the question or they personally consider it useful here. But, this defeats the very purpose of guidelines. If this community think certain questions that break the guidelines are okay, then it is time to update the guidelines appropriately without making it open-ended or having to make a decision almost always case by case. One example I can think of is stack overflow allowing cw big-list question on C and C++ that allows only one community-effort answer. A similar approach is taken for this question here: What are examples of very aggressive openings? (which I am glad to see). If the community here think certain questions that break the guidelines are good for this site, then I believe it is time to take a similar route or to update the guidelines. By the nature of the chess community, avoiding opinion-based questions completely is counter-productive. So, the boundaries of opinion-based questions not acceptable here must be defined in a concrete way (rather than deciding case by case every time).
I think this will help this community grow and save a lot of time for mods.
To give another example, "What is the one book you used that improved your chess if you can name only one" is a very useful question for chess community, which was posted (without "if you can name only one" part) in chess.com here by means of the comment section. There was good engagement there, but the lack of Q & A model makes it less useful for future readers. This question in particular is indeed opinion-based, and I agree that it does not fit this site. But, I think there are some questions of this type that fit this community (evidenced by the list of highest voted questions). And some of such big-list and/or opinion-based questions could make this site relevant for the chess community, I believe. So, it may be a good idea to think how to adapt the stack exchange guidelines to better suit the needs of the chess community.
Addendum 1: The issue is this. A platform could be flexible or rigid. If it is very flexible, then people will engage more, but finding useful information among all the chat is difficult (e.g. reddit, chess.com forums). If it is very rigid forum, then finding information is easy, but the engagement will be very low. The problem with chessSE is that it has both issues: finding useful information among all the opinions is difficult, and the engagement is very low (mainly because of lack of proper criteria to decide when a question is opinion-based or useless, and inconsistency resulting from that). This questions the relevance of chessSE as a forum.
Addendum 2: On second thought, "What is the one book you used that improved your chess if you can name only one" might be a good fit for this site. There is upvoting and downvoting. So, advertising is not going to work. But, in the current situation, you cannot ask this question and expect not to get the question closed. Other options are (i) asking this type of questions in a forum instead of a proper Q & A platform, (ii) change the language so that it may sound subjective (e.g. ask something like "Does there exist a book that vastly improved your understanding of chess and your rating by 500+ rating points in a short span?". Both are bad. One solution is creation of a Q & A platform which is more reasonable on the boundaries of opinion-based questions for chess community. I believe this is a void chessSE should strive to fill in some capacity.
