The thing that drove me away from the entire Stack* series of sites was the heavy-handed "doesn't fit the format" (read: mod doesn't like it) question closings for no good reason. I've honestly lost count of the number of times that valid questions with well spoken, informative answers were shut down due to this nonsense.
(The other was how much of a pain they make it to get started if you're new - one can look at the comments here and see that those kind of shenanigans are mostly unnecessary)
When you're killing off high-quality content because it "doesn't fit the format", perhaps the format needs to change.
I understand the "meta is murder" argument, and it's a tough and deadly problem. But I don't think splitting the meta into a separate site is the answer. You end up with a very strange self selection problem, where the "meta" community isn't very representative of the community at all.
Heh, the good old "high-quality content" argument... Any links to the almost-always-crap content you consider high quality? Don't get me wrong, it could actually be high quality, it's just that it rarely is... Links or it didn't happen.
Your reply here comes across as kind of dickish. One of the points of the comment you're replying to is that the mods seem to have radically different standards than the audience. And worse, that they're high-handed about it. So your you-probably-don't-know-what-quality-is reply is just demonstrating the problem.
I thought it was a great question and set of answers. I only know it's gone because I linked it from my personal website as I was proud of my answer. Eventually somebody contacted me to say, "Hey, your site is broken." So not only did some jackass delete a popular set of questions and answers, they did it without warning and with no apparent way to recover the lost work.
That was my "Fuck you, I'm done," moment for Stack Overflow.
The other extreme seems to be a situation like reddit's r/programming, which says (on every page) "If there is no code in your link, it probably doesn't belong here", yet usually half the posts violate it, i.e., you have guidelines but they're pretty universally ignored.
Which is better? I don't know. I personally haven't used either one in a while, because they don't seem to work well if you're not using a mainstream programming language. Google still wins for me here, since the right answer is very frequently on some random person's blog.
(The other was how much of a pain they make it to get started if you're new - one can look at the comments here and see that those kind of shenanigans are mostly unnecessary)
When you're killing off high-quality content because it "doesn't fit the format", perhaps the format needs to change.