Should we have edited a question to clarify the case to be considered after answers have been submitted?

Question

In this question on whether a Sorcerer can twin cast Simulacrum, the querent had originally included the following line:

Usually a Sorcerer does not have access to the Simulacrum spell, but he could use Wish to cast it.

Before any further edits, answers were submitted but none considered the case of Wish or how it might interact. They all focused on Simulacrum targeting requirements.

The question was then edited to reflect more clearly that Wish was involved.

After that, the querent returned and edited the question to explicitly include multiclass and wish options. Then another editor came later and fully removed the Wish part.

In this type of situation, is it better to leave the question as-is with the assumption that wish is what's necessary in order for a Sorcerer to Twin spell it to be responded to or clarified/corrected in answers or should we change the question to fit the answers that have come in after?

Or should there be a different way of approaching this?

The edits and timing under question are from both the querent as well as other stackizens and looking for direction on how to approach for both querents and editors.

Answer 1

Obviously since I was the one doing most of the editing I thought that the edit was in the best interest at the time. And, in retrospect, I still do. Regardless I'll put my thoughts here with the hope that it helps somewhat.

Normally if there is a faulty assumption in the question or something that can be expanded on, the question usually should remain open and the answers should address it. However, left as it was originally, it would have been closed as a dupe of another question (asking about metamagic with wish) because it doesn't matter how you get there, the metamagic/wish interaction is fully covered by an older question.

However, it was clear that OP's question was not actually about metamagic and wish but metamagic and simulacrum. When OP edited the question to involve both the MC option and wish, I edited to remove the wish part since that had been asked elsewhere and would be a duplicate. This allowed the author's intent to be emphasized and without a potential duplicate closure and OP later clarified the edit did indeed conform to their intent.

At the time of the final major change there were three answers on the question. Only one of the three mentioned anything about wish and thus only that one answer was affected by the change. It so happened that the other two questions were already answering the core question without realizing that wish would be a major factor. To be clear, the question was not edited "to fit the answers that have come in after".

After the change the one affected answer quickly modified their answer to be in line with the new wording and, as a result, we now have three valid answers on an open question. The other option would have been a closed question with two answers that did not answer the question so it seems the edit was a distinct improvement at minimal cost.

tl;dr I think it was the correct choice because it made the question focus on OP's actual intent instead of side issues, it kept the question from being closed, and the only cost was that one answer had to do an edit which was quickly done.

As always though I am open to critiques and suggestions for improvement and I may well have missed/overlooked something.