First, I'd like to establish that I'm someone currently trying to make the transition from an enthusiast to a professional. I'm entering college as an astrophysics major after four years of self-teaching myself physics and astronomy, so even though I've been learning to think more technically, I'm still an amateur.
Now that that's taken care of, I'll address the level of questions being asked. I joined Astronomy Stack Exchange almost a year after it entered beta, so I wasn't there for the early scope discussions. That said, I've done some research, and my impressions are that the types of questions being asked haven't changed much over the last two to three years. Non-technical, general interest questions continue to dominate the site. This is interesting to me, because most of the other science sites on Stack Exchange get far more questions from students (regrettably, many coming from homework problems). However, Astronomy contains many questions asked by those from the general public, with absolutely no technical background.
Is this a bad thing? That depends. One year ago, I became concerned that one site I moderate had a decent number of experts, but they weren't asking questions - merely answering them. I asked about this on Community Building Stack Exchange, with mixed results. One view holds that it's okay; experts may have fewer questions. Another suggested that the experts need to be incentivized a little to ask, because they might fear their questions won't be answered for quite some time. Neither seems to indicate that it's a problem if experts continue to not ask questions, but I disagree, as have many others before me.
The concern you've raised has been around since the beginning. It was first brought up in Balance between professional and enthusiast questions in private beta; Jon Ericson expanded upon this in Let's ask more meaty questions! (and that was later acted on in Everyone ask ONE expert question today!), because way too many early questions could be answered in less than 60 seconds by a simple web search. As far as I can tell, really easy questions are less of a problem nowadays. In that specific sense, Astronomy is doing a little better. However, the level of questions is still distinctly non-technical, and I think this is holding back quite a lot of experts.
Personally, I want to see way more technical questions being asked. I find a question that asks about, for example, an open problem regarding certain stellar magnetic fields1, or one about coronal heating, to be much more interesting than a basic question about the differences between different types of black holes2. That's just me, of course, but I find that the first type really make me think about the problem. If we get more technical questions, I think we'll encounter some more stimulating problems - even ones that the average person can understand and wonder about.
How we do this is a bigger concern. We obviously can't force experts to ask questions, and many, as far as I can tell, have never asked one. This might be a chicken-and-egg scenario - the experts don't ask questions because there are no technical questions asked and thus it seems unlikely that they'll get expert answers, and there are no technical questions asked because the experts don't ask them.
We then go back to the question I asked on Community Building Stack Exchange. The answer that suggested incentivization mentioned that self-answered questions might be a good idea. Self-answering on Stack Exchange has always been encouraged, so I don't think there will be much opposition to the idea from the community. If a professional feels like it, he or she can write up a question about a recent problem they came across, and write an answer detailing how they solved it. The audience that can fully understand this will be significantly, significantly smaller than the audience that can fully understand a question like Why is only one side of the Moon visible from Earth?, but I don't see that as a problem. People will still read it, people will still appreciate it, and hopefully it will encourage other technical questions.
Self-answers aren't, of course, the only way to do this. We could try to bring back the crusade in Everyone ask ONE expert question today!; if there's widespread support, maybe it could lead to change, jumpstarting people's interest in asking more complex questions and pondering more technical issues. This needs to be a site-wide effort, however - as will any other solution.
I suppose that this answer has morphed into a call to arms on the part of all Astronomy Stack Exchange users. Perhaps I'll ask it as a separate meta question, but the bottom line is this: We need to ask way more technical questions. If we don't, then comments like this one by Rob Jeffries on Physics Meta may hold for the rest of Astronomy's life:
More (high level) questions about astrophysics ... ? There is very little astrophysics on Astronomy SE (and even fewer astrophysicists) and the questions/answers have a very different flavour. You would rarely get many upvotes for a chapter and verse mathematical explanation of something.
We need to improve on this. Now. If we make this change, it can turn the site around, broaden its audience, increase its traffic, and make it healthy again.
Footnotes
1 Inadvertent self-promotion. My apologies.
2 I know, how supermassive black holes form is still an interesting and open problem, as recent questions have shown. But still.
A few other notes, not related to my main point that we need to take action:
I strongly disagree with the sentiment behind the following paragraph:
I think a key division is interest questions on astronomy vs technical questions related to doing astronomy. For the first there is Wikipedia and other question and answer sites, the latter for a Q&A community like this.
called2voyage expressed the same thoughts: Not all non-technical questions can be answered on Wikipedia, as I think a solid look around the site would show.
- I really don't know where the python question you asked about would be best on-topic, as I've never done programming for a task like that. Plus, I'm not fully knowledgeable about the scopes of Stack Overflow and Super User.
- There's always been some overlap (and thus confusion) in the scopes of Astronomy Stack Exchange and Space Exploration Stack Exchange. The communities do have different dynamics and different members, but there's a striking amount of overlap in these areas nonetheless. My basic summary is that information about spacecraft operation are on-topic only on Space Exploration; on topics such as planetary science or on experiments done by spacecraft, there are a lot of grey areas. Again as called2voyage said, check out each site's helper center and tour, and browse the questions
a bit a lot.
Anyway, I'm going to stop writing before my answer rivals War and Peace in length.