It becomes unmanageable. It's the bike shed problem. No one seems to want to edit or read the question for an answer that is a duplicate of what the user wants to say but everyone wants to put their fingerprint/mark on the question. Compare Hidden Features of Java with Hidden Features of C# where the community actively maintained the question into something that could be easily traversable (contents). So the harm in leaving the question open tells new users that it's okay to post questions like this since it has a high number of votes. But a high number votes neither proves or disproves the value of a question. At the onset it might but as popularity increases more votes are meaningless and it thusly turns into a popularity contest.

It would interesting to see how many users (who voted) actually paged through all 100 answers.

Take instead the Greatest Hits which do take into account data to determine value http://stackoverflow.com/questions/greatest-hits and you will notice none of these hidden features or list of x questions make the cut.

The argument used to keep them open is that they have value (which is why the notice was added), developers and moderators alike have said that they have gotten valuable information from these questions (Nick Craver, Joel Coehoorn, Bill the Lizard)

> This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here.

As for the single binding vote made by a moderator this could have been a result of many flags made by users that he had to act on. SO moderators and to an extent SE moderators will always be called http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22overzealous+moderators%22+s... and that's something they just have to live with in order to keep StackOverflow a place that is different from a forum. SO emerged because of a need to get Q&A different from a forum. Elections (http://stackoverflow.com/election) are held every year to get moderators knowledgeable of the process and users the community trusts to make decisions the community might not normally. Most SO moderators never see the main site regularly and are stuck in the flag queue answering the community needs.