This is not really about what is or isn't an “actual problem”. Focusing on that would be a red herring. Instead, you ran headlong into one of the quality alarms that the community consciousness shares, and the community responded by hitting the brakes (downvoting and closing). I'm going to talk about that alarm here.
(Brief aside: the degree of response you got is unusual and I can understand being upset about it. We can't do much to change it—moderators can't reverse votes for example. I guess the best takeaway is how/why this happened. I'm going to talk about that here too.)
Okay, so, the alarm you ran into. To discuss that, we first have to establish what RPG Stack Exchange is for.
What's RPG Stack Exchange for?
This is best summarised in our questions to avoid asking help page:
You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.
Our site functions at its absolute best when you are experiencing an actual problem in a real situation. That might be a mechanical problem that came up at the table, a social problem that came up in your group, a rules problem that came up while designing a character or planning an encounter, a quantification problem coming out of an optimization exercise, or a handful of other things.
The platonic ideal of a question is that the querent describes to us the actual situation that's really happening, they make it clear what specific part is the problem they're having, and they ask us how to resolve it. The querent is seeking a truthful answer, even if it wasn't what they expected or necessarily wanted to hear. If we ask for additional information or clarification the querent is able to provide answers—real actual situations have substance to them that makes this possible.
Not every question has to meet this platonic ideal (most don't). As long as we're somewhere approximately close to it our site will work well. The further we move away from that platonic ideal, the more trouble we begin to have.
(I mention optimisation questions above, so I should be clear about something. When someone's investigating theoretical character optimisation in a question, “theoretical” is in the name, but it's still a real situation someone's dealing with and a real problem they're actually having. This means we can still get good answers.)
What quality alarm did you run into?
Your questions met a certain pattern: you asked multiple highly specific, theoretical, and sorta-contrived questions around a specific mechanic in a short time period. When we see this pattern it tells us that something weird is happening and that we are probably very far from that platonic ideal, and that we need to hit the brakes and find out what is going on here. This is because we have seen this pattern come up a lot of times and that has been the case every time.
The most benign thing we see when this pattern comes up is that someone has an actual problem they're facing, but they're not describing it to us. They have found potential solutions and ask about those instead of their actual problem, or they ask us contrived questions which they hope will help them find their solution. (Since none of our answers solve their actual problem they will naturally have multiple additional questions rotating around the exact same thing.)
This is what we describe as the XY problem, and so we hit the brakes. We ask them: “hey, whoa, obviously there's something going on here, but instead of asking us about that thing, you're asking us about all these other things. Please instead describe to us about the actual thing you're dealing with and ask us how to to solve that.” Then they do that, and a lot of people save a lot of time and energy by tackling the problem at its root.
At its worst, we find out the querent isn't looking for a truthful answer. Instead they have a specific answer they want so that they can twist their GM's arm into letting them make an OP build (or something like that) and they're trying to make us give them the answer they want. Our site is in the business of collecting truthful answers so we consider this a bad-faith usage of the site. These querents tend to give us a lot of grief and trouble.
I don't believe you were doing anything along the lines of this bad faith example. I'm describing it to make it clear that when we see the pattern I described, things can be very wrong—hence us hitting the brakes.
What's this mean for your situation?
Basically the take-away here is to focus on asking about problems you are actually having for yourself.
You explain that you were asking benignly on behalf of the community in general. It may be surprising, but we don't necessarily want the site used this way. We want such questions to be asked by people actually experiencing that problem. When you're asking without having the problem yourself, it's not a real situation so you're not really able to provide the clarity we might want. You wind up asking a lower-quality question this way than someone actually experiencing the problem might ask, and that might actually do a disservice to the people having that problem: now the only version of that question is not actually the best quality one that could be had.
If you were in fact experiencing this problem, then rather than contriving some situations (“I have three differently-colored arrows”) we would've wanted you to ask the actual situation you were dealing with, which probably would've been something like “I have two magical arrows and one dipped in poison. My GM and I don't agree on how I get to handle recovering them. I think this thing happens, but she says this other thing happens. What actually happens?”
If you personally just want to better understand how ammo recovery works, ask on your own behalf, not someone else's. “I'm confused about how arrow recovery would work in this situation. I think this thing would happen, but I'm not sure. What happens?” This means ask about an actual situation you'd actually expect to see happen to you one day, and avoid contrived scenarios nobody including you will ever really bump into (like red, blue, and yellow arrows).
Generally community members also feel they're here to make a difference for actual people. They want their time spent on problems people are actually having, and resent having their time spent on nonexistent problems nobody is actually experiencing. We had a user who asked a lot of questions like that—“I'm not having this problem, I don't even play this game, but someone else might have this problem one day”—and we consistently had so much trouble with their content that eventually they got an automated question ban imposed by the site. (Automatic question bans are triggered by someone having many questions that are consistently low-quality, closed, and/or deleted. Diamond moderators can neither apply nor overturn these bans.)
So to summarise... surprisingly, asking selfishly (more or less) only about your own problems you're actually having turns out to be the best way to help the broader RPG community and also yourself.
The reception you got
You're understandably upset and I'm sorry about that. From your perspective, I understand you were checking all the boxes, doing everything right, asking perfectly decent questions. You ran into some community practices you were not aware of.
My best understanding is the scale of the feedback you've gotten in response (i.e. downvotes) is down to three multiplicative effects:
- You ran into our quality alarm, which naturally triggers downvotes and closure.
- It wasn't a real problem, and people didn't like that, leading to more downvotes in disapproval.
- You asked on meta, which makes The Meta Effect(tm) happen: whatever was going to happen now happens more, faster, and sooner.
This sucks to be on the receiving end of and I'm sorry you're experiencing it. We can't do much about it—votes can't be reversed or cleared for example. The cat is out of the box and we can't put it back.
The best outcome here is probably to cut your losses on these questions and leave them behind as a learning experience. The community here does forgive relatively easily when they see learning demonstrated. We understand that everyone has a bad day from time to time. We also understand that people sometimes run into bad problems. The Stack Exchange network always has things for all of us to learn, and sometimes we don't learn about these things until we run face-first into them. Most of us have had that happen with one thing or another, just some of us have our run-in worse than others.
