Our previous policy on how to permit and handle all recommendation requests was revoked by popular acclaim, for a simple reason:
Nobody liked following them
It has been asserted that the effect of that revocation on tool-recs was not intended, but that assertion doesn't change the fact that the policy is gone. Revoking the recs policy took tool-recs down with it for the same reason: nobody liked following the policy for tool-recs, and so they were mostly not followed.
So we currently do not have a policy that could handle tool-recs being on-topic, even if we were to declare them so. Without such a policy permitting recommendation requests (to locally-supersede the SE policy against them), we cannot accept them.
The previous guidelines did not work
Just asserting that tool-recs should be on-topic is technically not implementable, as we lack a supporting set of rules to make it work. Proposing that the old rules should be reinstated with no rewrite is not practical either, as we have ample evidence they fail to do the job.
We won't be re-using the previous guidelines as-written, as they did not work as intended: we were bad at following them. Persuasive reasoning that the community will somehow follow them faithfully this time is, I suppose, not impossible in theory, but without at least attempting to show how they will work differently this time for tool-recommendations, they won't be reinstated as-written.
A new policy that integrates the lessons we've learned since 2010 would have a better chance of success, but as there are ample places on the Internet to make such requests, and this is a fringe use-case for RPG.se, I see no positive cost-benefit value to the effort of developing new draconian rules to allow our site to accommodate these marginal questions.
We-the-community like the idea of *-recs but not the reality
I think we like the idea of recommendation questions more than we like their reality. We want to share our love of awesome things, be they games or tools or whatever, and reap the rewards of others agreeing that yes, that thing is awesome.
But we don't really like the discipline necessary to make them work here. We don't want to follow restrictive rules about what we can and can't recommend, and what we must and mustn't say about the things we love. Even worse, we can't control random new users who aren't even aware of the policy, and who don't understand why they're being hit with downvotes and comments telling them they did something wrong.
We cannot gracefully handle recommendation questions. We don't have the depth of will to do them well. Even those of us who do have the will are not able to pass that will onto new users as the community membership experiences turnover. We recognised that and abandoned the attempt as futile. We still like them, in theory, but in practice we don't actually want what it would take to host them.
The bottom line of our situation is that until someone comes up with a brilliant plan that will address the fact that nobody liked following the rules, we won't be restoring any kind of recommendation request question to on-topic status. We all like them and wish we could host them here, but wish-based decision making doesn't lead to success.
Other places on the Internet serve the need just fine, and we don't. That's OK, and that's the current bottom line.
