With a large caveat that moderators have the ability to scrub context from a problem question (e.g., comments) and user (e.g., deleting their past submissions), this is what appears to the outside world:
* A new user asks what they think is a dumb question.
* They get an answer. Still thinking it was a dumb question and not knowing how Stack Overflow works, attempts to blank out the question and request deletion.
* A user with 22k rep (i.e., a power user) goes in and rolls back the question.
* The asker rolls back the rollback.
At this point, the appropriate thing to do is flag the question for a moderator (important addendum: and move on). That doesn't happen. Instead:
* The power user—who really should know better—gets into a petty rollback war with the asker, and the question gets reverted 15 times in 5 minutes before another power user steps in and reverts it.
* The roll back wars stop, but an hour later a diamond moderator steps in and locks the question anyway. (Correction: I originally said it was unlocked 45 minutes later, but child comments correctly point out it was unlocked automatically a week later).
* The asker, who by all appearances has asked a single question, gets banned for 15 years.[1]
* The question, while not the best question ever, is decent enough and gets interesting answers but somehow gets a -35 score (edit: now down to -41 in the 20 minutes since I posted this comment), making it one of the worst questions on the site.[2] The comments[3] speculate that it was due to the edit war. So much for voting on a question instead of the person.
It's stuff like this that drives people up the wall when it comes to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, and it happens way too easily (I know I slipped into it a few times during my time as a Stack Exchange power user).
[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/users/2398036/user2398036
[2]: The questions page, when sorted by votes, only goes to -27 on page 410,195: http://stackoverflow.com/questions?page=410195&sort=votes
[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16630713/is-it-true-in-py...