I am strongly inclined to think this is the particular moderator culture with a strong sense of egoism and position rather than pursuit of constructive moderation; while maybe 95% of similar questions should be closed as "not constructive" this clearly is a useful and constructive question (the exact place where a moderator should be using good personal discretion!).
This kind of thing definitely turns me off stack-exchange sites -- especially I find that the sites aside from stack-overflow (which has a larger and perhaps more responsive user-base) are prone to terrible over-moderation and as well as very selective moderation.
