The ground rules for softwarerecs give top billing to the idea of listing specific requirements in a question, and I totally get why that is. But what about those cases where a user may not actually know enough about the domain to ask a specific question?
For instance, let's say I'm new to Java and want to use an IDE. There are a ton out there: IDEA, Eclipse, BlueJ, vim, emacs... you get the point. They all have different features, but as a newbie, I don't know what those possible features are. In other words, I don't know what I should be looking for.
To give a more concrete example: autocomplete is going to help me out a lot as I feel my way around the JDK. But I may not know such a feature is out there — heck, I may not even know that I'm going to spend so much time learning the JDK — and thus I can't list it as a requirement.
Absent this site (or a helpful buddy), the only way I could really be informed enough to ask a good recommendation question is to sit down and learn a bunch of these IDEs... at which point (1) I don't need to ask the question, (2) I've spent a lot of time and (3) I haven't contributed to the world's knowledge base; the next person in my shoes will also just have to sit down and learn those same IDEs.
So the question I really want to ask in this situation would be something like:
I'm fairly new to Java and am looking for a good IDE. What are my options? What features should I look for? And which IDEs have those features?
This is a bad question according to the ground rules, but I contend that it's an incredibly useful question to answer; it's asked countless times a day by Java newbies (and of course, this extends to other things besides Java IDEs specifically). And sure, I could google "java best IDE?" and get a bunch of articles — but I have no way of knowing which of those answers are good. I'm missing the voting features of a SE site.
So, is there any way to fit these sorts of more open-ended questions into softwarerecs?