Pondering common answers

So, in a side discussion with a friend (that came about after he spent 2 hours looking for a missing class in Java), I'm now raging again about what I can only call "common answers". Consider the following questions that newbies might ask:

• "How do I make a website?" -> "install apache"
• "How do I send my code to other people?" -> "use git"
• "How do I monitor things?" -> "use nagios/cacti/munin/..."

None of these are necessarily good answers, often for reasons that take a lot more detail to understand or explain.

There's a case of "worth" as well, I suppose. How do you know when "just use apache" will actually be a good enough answer for what someone wants to achieve?

Another side of this is people's ...inability(?) to actually know what they really want, and is some cases a variation of the XY Problem

There's also the so-called half-life of facts to further complicate matters. A correct answer now is not the right one 3 years down the line, requiring the answering party to have time-accurate knowledge, which in turn leads to a requirement to continually keep up with things.

Seems @nedbat wrote some related stuff about this. Worth a read.