>that's par for the course on Stack Overflow

This is tangential to the meat of your comment but I feel compelled to nitpick based entirely on personal anecdote: I have been helped hundreds of times on StackOverflow by people who had nothing to gain from it and yet provided in depth, insightful answers. In my experience, the farther you get away from the big, overwhelmed tags, the better the quality is. But you don't want to get so obscure that you are just ignored.

The Racket community on SO is particularly fantastic, and (in my experience) the more 'web' related your question is, the worse answers you get.