It wasn't supposed to be like that. Atwood and Spolsky had an insufficiently refined concept of what makes a good question, that was overly tied to "keeping the riff-raff out" and insufficiently based in having a searchable reference that covers a full spectrum of "difficulty levels" but still having every question clearly posed and properly scoped.

Also, they had the usual incentives to avoid doing things that would slow down initial growth. They were trying to build a community, and they definitely succeeded at that.

It took until the "middle times" for people to really develop an understanding of how questions for a Q&A site are supposed to look. And then the rest of the time was spent trying to convey those standards accurately, caught between the usual archetypes of angry forum users, in a place that was not supposed to be a forum.