Why was my NaA flag declined?

Question

Our site generally has a fairly strict policy for deleting answers that don't really answer the question, eg. advice not backed up by system expertise (see eg. this Meta and this). I flagged this answer as Not an Answer because it doesn't really answer the question, and my flag was declined. (update: seems that it was eventually deleted)

The question asks: "Is my homebrew balanced?"

The answer's parts, relevant to the question:

This is okay...

(two chapters discussing the names of class features)

With some fixes, this could shape up to be a great class.

No part of that answer makes any attempt at reasoning for or against the homebrew class's balance. It just says "That's ok". That's Not an Answer.

Why was my flag declined? If answers to other questions are NaA for not showing their work, do we really want to keep unreasoned answers around in homebrew evaluation questions?

Answer 1

I declined the flag. In hindsight I ought to have not done so and instead left it to community review.

There were two things on my mind. First, I'd been thinking about homebrew review questions all day because of some conversations in chat, and I was probably internally thinking “this is a review therefore a sincere answer, even if it may be a bad answer.” That was not correct of me: it is still a pointed “is this balanced?” question and naming is tangential.

Second, there's value in bad answers: they're informative to people seeking an answer that this is not the one, and they teach people which kinds of answers should not be left. So in the scope of reading it as a valid answer I considered it enough it was already downvoted.

I have raised a new NAA flag on that post to get it back into the NAA review queue.