Cool! Let's introduce a whole new category of flam^H^H^H^Hmeta-discussion: what is off topic and what isn't. Are HTML questions off topic? MySQL questions? Company politics? How you'd like your clients to be? OS-specific questions? What to do with a thread that starts as a Perl question, but ends with a discussion about MySQL vs. Oracle?
If there is one thing we learned from the above discussion, it is that there is no way to say beforehand whether a post is Off-topic or not. Some perfectly valid Perl-related questions "degenerate" into off-topic musings and sometimes things which seem off-topic at first, finally are found to contain at their core a beautiful Pe(a)rl.
Hence my suggestion to tie this into the consideration system and a special section.
CountZero
"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law