Hard problem, harsh answer. Apologies in advance.
This answer has been cooking in my head for 3-4 days, so it is quite long. Apologies again.
I am one of those users that could not be kept by the vi.SE community, I got bored after a couple of days and left. When I looked at this question I decided to analyze why I left, and this raised extra questions, which i describe below.
This is an expansion of @AI.G.'s answer most notably:
Most of the questions' answers here are either :h something or a combination of functions that are again already documented.
I'll be interested if you can come up with some reasonable (interesting) question that can't be answered this way.
That's wrong! Not AI.G.'s way of putting it but expecting that we can make a website out of Vim questions that cannot be answered with :h something.
Why is that wrong? 90% of all posts on SO and SE sites can be answered with RTFM, but they still provide value. Why is that? Because they add a couple of points that the author of the answer added in his own words. There is value in the answer because someone searching for that answer may find the authors explanation easier than the one provided in the manual.
(Yes, some SE answer are literally: RTFM , and those do not provide extra value. Yet, that kind of answer is only common in certain niches.)
I'm not discrediting the Vim help. Vim has one of the best documentations around, and since I started reading it I learned a lot. What I'm saying is that a community saying go read the docs, they're great does not need an active Q&A website. But I'm ranting, let's add actual arguments to it by describing why do I visit SE websites in the first place:
Why do I come to SE websites?
Because it is fun, and I always learn something new. That's it, it is that simple.
I come to my communities, read the first two or three pages of active posts, cherry pick some 5 or 6 topics and read them. Often I find one or two I can reply, other I read simply because I'm curious about the topic. Example:
When I see a question about subprocesses in zsh I read it because I always wanted to learn about subprocesses in zsh but never had the time to go through man zshcompsys. A question with a good answer will allow me to learn something about zsh subprocesses without going through the man. Will I learn all? No. Will I learn more if I read the man? Yes. But I want to read the answer because I have returned home from a day at work and want to read 6-7 paragraph written in a funny way instead of the 3000 words man.
And that is what we are doing wrong here on vi.SE
As Vim users we are most often minimalists and value practical solutions over exact ones (contrary to the emacs pedants, hehehe). But StackExchange is not the kind of place suited for minimalism.
Proposed Solution
When we answer with RTFM, let's add some of our own impressions about the commands the user is asking about. Write one or two paragraphs of extra info related to the command so the user and an observer can learn from it.
There are pretty much two kinds of questions on SE sites:
This does not work. Can be made into a great answer by extending the problem explanation into: (1) explanation why it does not work (2) how can it be made to work (3) other options of making this work.
How do I do X. Can be answered with different ways of doing X. Citing plugins is fine. But we want an educational way of presenting it, therefore explaining pieces of code from the plugin (literally going into the repo and pasting the 10 most important lines of code here and describing them) is best.
We need to leave the minimalism and extremely practical approach to the side when coming to vi.SE, and instead turn on teacher mode where we try to be more verbose in the explanation.
Final thoughts
Personally I left vi.SE when I joined the vim-dev mailing list to report a problem. I found that skimming the emails from vim-dev everyday provided me with more knowledge about Vim than skimming the first page of Q&A here on vi.SE.
Other places follow a convention where, even if a question is answered with the first comment you should still post an answer. The reasoning is that, probably, the author of the comment decided that he does not want to maintain an answer for this question or maybe simply had not enough time to write it. Some examples of question that have been answered with the first comment but still produced a lot of actual answers:
