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I've have not noticed what you describe... yet I've asked questions that have never been answered by moderators (so we can assume that any moderator that have seen them was not able to answer them). On both Drupal.SE and the original SO.

On Drupal.SE, you don't get reputation by asking and anwering your own question. You only get points by getting your questions and answer up-voted and accepted or by getting a suggested edit accepted. However, you loose reputation when you downvote anything. So there is no reputation incentive to vote things down. And there is no reputation gain in moderating anything since you don't get reputation by moderating.

• A SE site is not a forum. One of the premise of SE is that a forum is a bad solution to implement a Q&A site. And while Drupal is certainly capable of being configured/extended to implement a solution much more like SE, it would require a substential amount of work.
• There is actually a lot on control given by SE to the community. Much of the governance of a SE site is delegated its community via the accompagning meta site.
• If I remember correctly, there is an API usable to create an external backup of a SE site. There is actually a lot of junk sites that re-publish complete SE sites with added ads. Should Drupal officialy uses Drupal.SE as its Q&A site, peridiodic backup and an exit strategy in case SE fails the community would be required.
• Dicussions are better kept on a forum, the idea of the suggestion is to use SE as replacement for the support forum(s). That said, answering your own question should be an accepted practice accross all SE sites (see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/12513/should-i-not-answer-my-ow...). One of the example given would make a good self-answered question.
• The decision of were to redirect the user has already been made by Google and numerous search engines. Drupal.SE is the clear winner. The problem is mostly that Drupal.org invite the newcomers to uses the support forum(s) on drupal.org when Drupal.SE is seen by many (me included) as a better place (better answer, more active users, better structure, etc.).
• Yep, moderation on SE site can be harsh and can be dismissive, but they never are insulting. I actually think this is one of their strength because it tends to keep people who don't want to invest the time required to be helped out of the site. The lack of this kind of moderation on a lot of forums (and I don't speak of Drupal.org's forum as I don't use them) usually leads to a flood of badly written questions with badly (and usually wrong) answers. It drives off the people who are willing to help with Drupal issues, not those poor communiction skill issue and unrealistic expectations of how community support works.
  Sadly it also have a bad side effect, some users can be overzealous when it comes to moderations. And sometimes it makes some newcomers feel unwelcome. Shall Drupal.SE be used, that' s something that would have to be closely watched and managed through the SE community management tools (including the meta site).

I am broadly against this idea for a number of reasons:

• this is a dreadful indictment of Drupal if it cannot even do a fairly standard content management task like a forum. Drupal.org is also a showcase of what can be done with Drupal.
• there is a damaging loss of integration of the visiting user into the whole Drupal.org web universe. This is directly harmful to the building of a Drupal community and the search engine optimisation of Drupal.org. When on Drupal.org users will more easily stumble across or be helped onto other Drupal things (e.g. modules, user groups, Drupal events, Drupal jobs), whereas on SE the only thing users are going to stumble onto is things even further away from Drupal (example of questions currently in the sidebar of a 'Drupal' page on SE: "An aeroplane, when it leaves the ground, 'takes off'. What does a bird do?"
• we become entirely reliant upon the policies and decisions taken by SE and have no say upon what they do.
• we become vulnerable even to SE closure of the service. We can argue that the risk is small, but we should bear it in mind as a risk. These folk below didn't expect it for other externalised services:
  • http://denver2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/services-inside-and-out
  • https://drupal.org/node/2209393
• There are forum posts which are in no way Questions, and thus would not be allowed on SE, for example:
  • https://drupal.org/node/2207931 and therefore would not be accepted on SE
  • https://drupal.org/node/2173123
• there is a valid place for the Drupal.org linear forum format
• I don't see any reason why we shouldn't keep the current Drupal.org forums, and if people want to use the SE Q&A format, fine, and let Google decide where to direct users
• I dislike some of the dismissive way that some questions are brushed aside. Typical SE blocking comments:
  

  closed as off topic by kiamlaluno♦ Apr 30 '13 at 16:53

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I've posted some related issues here:
https://drupal.org/node/2186377

Also here https://drupal.org/project/issues/search?issue_tags=metrics

This seems like it should be an issue in Drupal.org Customizations that folks who are interested in this idea might be able to push forward.

LewisNyman, I'm not sure how this would replace a “was this helpful?” button as I recently proposed here https://drupal.org/node/2205671

"mostly useless" is a pretty bold claim when that particular block was designed/developed with a rigorous analysis to ensure it is useful: https://drupal.org/node/323106

Letting people edit the data is proposed in https://drupal.org/node/479812 (which I see mgifford has already commented on).

Seems like a solid idea to mix with the automated recommendations.

There was a previous issue about how to improve this block:
https://drupal.org/node/479812

Right now it's mostly useless, your suggesting would definitely be an improvement.

Perhaps we can tackle this in the next month or so.

Everything that I read seems to indicate that github could take us 80-90% (rough numbers ... put the pitchforks away) towards a workable solution leaving some serious, but not unsolvable, issues to work on. I keep getting stuck on that thought.

So I called github to see what they thought about this issue and the associated google doc. Here's a rough summary of their thoughts because this was an informal conversation.

• They feel that their platform is a perfect companion to the work we are doing. (naturally)
• They feel that the project would benefit the most, in regards to some of the user management issues, from using their public facing site vs some type of an enterprise partnership where we ran versions of their software.
• They reviewed the spreadsheet and concerns and feel that the majority of the issues are related to workflow and are solvable.
• They are willing to provide direct contacts between the projects (they can't give us a dedicated team but can connect us to individuals).
• They are willing to help us develop a migration plan.
• They are willing to do a webex with us to discuss as a group.
• They are willing to help us with messaging regarding workflow changes.
• They are willing to send a group to talk with us in person.
• They are willing to escalate their support efforts if we migrate to help us as a community.

I think that we could save a lot of infrastructure cost, maintenance, and contributor time with a partnership like this and that it could, in theory, help pave the way for future relationships that might be able to help us. It seems like the next logical phone call would be to the Travis-CI folks. I'd love to tell them "Hey, we have tests that are so good that we can't use your existing system and want to help you create modification X, Y and Z."