I think your description of the problem is about right.

But: As a SO-consumer this particular problem doesn't phase me.

The better answers usually have more votes and sometimes the green checkmark is even on the best one - but when it's not, who cares?

To me as a SO-consumer a bigger problem recently has been the duplication. For any given question there may be dozens of threads which makes it harder to track down the good one(s). If SO wants to improve they should imho work on their deduplication efforts.

This might even be automatable to a point; let users vote on questions to be merged, and perform the merge when either the author agrees or a vote-threshold is met.