In the past I asked questions on SE sites with as much brevity as I could. I did not want to distract readers from my actual question. But this often led to answers and comments along the lines of "why would you want to do this?" or "you shouldn't be trying to do this; here is what you should do instead".
So I started offering background, to deter these kinds of responses. I'm trying to communicate that "yes, I do have a good reason for wanting to do this, and even if you think I'm asking the wrong question, there are complications that make my question necessary all the same".
I did that with this question and asked a LaTeX question that mentioned MathJax. Within an hour enough closure votes came in to put the question on hold, presumably because the users view MathJax as off-topic. But I feel like these voters weren't really reading the question. They were just distracted by the mention of MathJax.
So is the culture here that we should just ask minimalistic questions? Had I simply asked "Can I get superscript behavior in math mode without using ^
?" and left it at that, without mention of MathJax, would that be preferable? (And it may be that this cultural question has different answers at different SE sites.)