"Shopping Guidance" questions

Question

There've been some successful answers to this question by answering a more general form of the question to make a feature-comparison rather than a "shopping recommendation".

I'm not sure how to cleanup this question, but can we learn something here? I'm thinking that a good "Shopping Guidance" question should contain:

• relevant features in question for both products (so answerers don't have to follow links to shopping sites to answer).

• description of what it is needed for, to establish the perspective from which to evaluate the features.

Thoughts? Additions?

Answer 1

This seems to be a good place to repeat, to meta.Music, the concerns I posted to Chat room Musical Practice and Performance about heavy-handed use of the "no shopping recs" site scope rule. They are raised by my question How can I rehearse and perform with PDF scores on screen instead of paper scores?.

Right now the rule on music.SE appears to be that shopping recommendation questions are out of scope, and are summarily closed. I think that's a mistake. I believe that there are good questions which will elicit good answers, even though some may interpret them as "shopping recs". This meta.Music question presumes that some kind of "shopping guidance" questions, if not "shopping rec", will be allowed in-scope. I support that.

• Case in point: the most highly voted question in Music.SE, What is good software for learning how to sight-read?, is very much a shopping rec question.
• 23-vote question, Software that allows playing in different temperaments. 5 of 8 responses recommend specific products.
• An objection to my question was, 'I don't see how this question can be answered further than "choose your equipment and learn how to use it".' The same objection seems to apply to What to look for when buying a digital piano for a beginner?, yet that was allowed to stay open. The question got 17 votes, the top answer got 19 votes.
• An influential source citation for "no shopping recommendations" rule is a SE blog post Q&A is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping!. It says shopping rec questions are bad because a) it's hard for the question to specify all circumstances needed to give good recommendations, and b) the technology SuperUser covers changes rapidly.

But, in Music.SE, technology doesn't change so fast, even shopping recs may be valid for long enough to be useful.

A further frustration: the "Let's Go Shopping" blog does admit a "what do I need to learn to do X" question is appropriate. I duly transform my initial Shopping Rec question into a "How do I do X" question, and it still triggers the Shopping Rec antibodies. So, maybe the antibodies are too active, and are smothering possible good questions along with bad?

Answer 2

I think it may be a dupe of What to look for when buying a digital piano for a beginner?. While I agree that there are "bad" and "not as bad" shopping questions, I still don't think we want the latter. What is the point in going through a feature comparison every time someone goes shopping as opposed to having a complete question like the one I linked? Anyone should be able to go through that, decide what features are important to them, and evaluate individual products on that basis.