SO has always had a very specific purpose in mind, and this has been advocated by Jeff Atwood, et al since the beginning. It was
never meant to be a discussion based site. In fact, to quote the man himself,
"At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already." [0]
The entire point of StackOverflow is to answer questions as quickly, accurately, and efficiently as possible. You want more discussion? There's a chat room available. You want long, permanent discussion about (e.g.) the merits of various JavaScript frameworks? You're on the wrong site.
Plain and simple, SO is not (and never was) meant to be "a tool for developers who used it in many different ways". It was meant to be sued in one way: ask a concrete, specific, real-world question and get one specific answer that will always be correct.
Discussions about obsolete frameworks are fine. People still use them. If you are asking a question with a concrete answer that will not change, go for it. And by will not change, I mean that an answer about how to do something in Python 2.6 will never change, even though the version itself has been superseded by Python 2.7 and 3.x. That's still the right way to do the thing you want in Python 2.6.
Perhaps to most important point you are making is that "this judgement of what is good information and bad information is ... subjective. We have merely replaced flame wars with these debates." But the thing is, no one is really debating. This question was answered when the site began. Or certainly not long after. SO is a finely tuned machine, really, really good at one thing: answering practical questions in a practical way.
In fact, read up on the Coding Horror article referenced above[0]. Jeff Atwood talks about Discourse, a framework he and some other folks are trying to put together to address the need for a really good discussion-based environment. He makes the point that forums are the place where these discussions happen and are saved for posterity, and that's how it should be. When talking about the option of Stack Exchange as an online community for discussion, he refers to it as "quite frankly, terrible", because "We only do strict, focused Q&A there."
That really should put the issue to rest. SO is not a place to have open ended discussions. That's what forums are for.
[0] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse...