Here my thoughts: it is true that the section is suboptimal from the users' perspective, but there is a big plus on how it is actually configured: it is categorized!

I remember I used frequently the section in my early days here; having genral purpose question indicized by category was something I was happy with.

More: the section is constrained to be ..of general interest to the Perl programming community. and explicitly overlapping with official Perl's FAQs. In my opinion this too is a feature. Infact to flag a question as a good one can vary a lot on subjective basis. A question on how to free memory allocated by a Tk::Image object can be a good one, and can merit to be frontpaged but is surely not of general interest.

We must also consider we are in 2016: it is more rare a question on how to loop over multiple arrays, or how to format dates and even when these questions arise we found answers like: "it is a CategorizedAnswer" or "is in the FAQ".

That said my opinion is that mix the actual section into SOPW is a loose, more than a semplification.

You said "I can tell you that it would be essentially impossible to improve by a sequence of minor tweaks." and I'm sure you know the matter but i feel to suggest anyway some minor tweeks: make categorized answers upvotable only by high level monks: level 15 or 18 can be the treshold, and then order the answers by experience: this can be a fast way to know which answers is, probably, the best one. Experience of such posts can be visible to all monks by default.

The QandAEditors members are yet able to move a post into the section, i suppose. But it must also be said that the group is very very small and will be great if some recent and wise monks could be added to it.

About voting system and good flag: the voting systems is as is. It can be dangerous,imho, to add flags to a post and leave the voting system as is: a post marked as good can attract more votes than normal only to have been flagged. I think the only possible thing to do to make better post more visible is to show the respectability of the monk writing along his name in the post title:

Amonk lvl 19 11/25/13 (XP per post overall/XP per post current year/best answers)

Infact if "examine what is said not him who speaks" is wise, is even wiser to know who speaks, too.

L*