close it sure to prevent more and more unnecessary answers being added

This is a good sign the question is open ended and simply asking for polling. We explicitly discourage these questions, for various reasons. I won't go into the details of why, as you seem to understand the reasoning behind this.

delete a perfectly good post becuase it doesn't match up with the letter of the rules.

I would argue that if it does not comply with the current rules, it is not a perfectly good post. It might have been on topic at one point, and of course it got a lot of votes and views in the meantime. That is great, and I can understand that the question has value to you.

But our rules have changed, and we cannot let questions similar to this stay on the site forever, just because they had some merit back then, but degenerated into a list of answers open for polling—and you even agreed that we should "prevent more and more unnecessary answers being added." With such a question, you would always get new answers or people adding their two cents, but even if there were a new useful answer being added, how could it ever compete against a four year old 20-something scoring post?

Users seeing such questions will draw traffic to our site for the wrong reasons. They would take it as an excuse to ask similar ones. We've had these problems during the period where lots of these kind of polling questions were still not closed and not deleted. Telling users that their question is off topic while another one can stay just because it is older was not a good plan to follow.

Sure it could be seen as useful by a large number of people, but not useful to our site specifically, and the mission of Stack Exchange sites as a whole. We cannot possibly keep such questions around forever, sorry.

With that specific question, typing "best clipboard manager" into Google does in fact lead me to the same answers you found, by the way. As also mentioned in one of the deleted answers:

close it sure to prevent more and more unnecessary answers being added

This is a good sign the question is open ended and simply asking for polling. We explicitly discourage these questions, for various reasons. I won't go into the details of why, as you seem to understand the reasoning behind this.

delete a perfectly good post becuase it doesn't match up with the letter of the rules.

I would argue that if it does not comply with the current rules, it is not a perfectly good post. It might have been on topic at one point, and of course it got a lot of votes and views in the meantime. That is great, and I can understand that the question has value to you.

But our rules have changed, and we cannot let questions similar to this stay on the site forever, just because they had some merit back then, but degenerated into a list of answers open for polling—and you even agreed that we should "prevent more and more unnecessary answers being added." With such a question, you would always get new answers or people adding their two cents, but even if there were a new useful answer being added, how could it ever compete against a four year old 20-something scoring post?

Users seeing such questions will draw traffic to our site for the wrong reasons. They would take it as an excuse to ask similar ones. We've had these problems during the period where lots of these kind of polling questions were still not closed and not deleted. Telling users that their question is off topic while another one can stay just because it is older was not a good plan to follow.

Sure it could be seen as useful by a large number of people, but not useful to our site specifically, and the mission of Stack Exchange sites as a whole. We cannot possibly keep such questions around forever, sorry.

With that specific question, typing "best clipboard manager" into Google does in fact lead me to the same answers you found, by the way. As also mentioned in one of the deleted answers:

close it sure to prevent more and more unnecessary answers being added

This is a good sign the question is open ended and simply asking for polling. We explicitly discourage these questions, for various reasons. I won't go into the details of why, as you seem to understand the reasoning behind this.

delete a perfectly good post becuase it doesn't match up with the letter of the rules.

I would argue that if it does not comply with the current rules, it is not a perfectly good post. It might have been on topic at one point, and of course it got a lot of votes and views in the meantime.

But our rules have changed, and we cannot let questions similar to this stay on the site forever, just because they had some merit back then, but degenerated into a list of answers open for polling—and you even agreed that we should "prevent more and more unnecessary answers being added." With such a question, you would always get new answers or people adding their two cents.

Users seeing such questions will draw traffic to our site for the wrong reasons. They would take it as an excuse to ask similar ones. Sure it could be seen as useful by a large number of people, but not useful to our site specifically, and the mission of Stack Exchange sites as a whole. We cannot possibly keep such questions around forever.

With that specific question, typing "best clipboard manager" into Google does in fact lead me to the same answers you found, by the way. As also mentioned in one of the deleted answers:

close it sure to prevent more and more unnecessary answers being added

This is a good sign the question is open ended and simply asking for polling. We explicitly discourage these questions, for various reasons. I won't go into the details of why, as you seem to understand the reasoning behind this.

delete a perfectly good post becuase it doesn't match up with the letter of the rules.

I would argue that if it does not comply with the current rules, it is not a perfectly good post. It might have been on topic at one point, and of course it got a lot of votes and views in the meantime. That is great, and I can understand that the question has value to you.

But our rules have changed, and we cannot let questions similar to this stay on the site forever, just because they had some merit back then, but degenerated into a list of answers open for polling—and you even agreed that we should "prevent more and more unnecessary answers being added." With such a question, you would always get new answers or people adding their two cents, but even if there were a new useful answer being added, how could it ever compete against a four year old 20-something scoring post?

Users seeing such questions will draw traffic to our site for the wrong reasons. They would take it as an excuse to ask similar ones. We've had these problems during the period where lots of these kind of polling questions were still not closed and not deleted. Telling users that their question is off topic while another one can stay just because it is older was not a good plan to follow.

Sure it could be seen as useful by a large number of people, but not useful to our site specifically, and the mission of Stack Exchange sites as a whole. We cannot possibly keep such questions around forever, sorry.

With that specific question, typing "best clipboard manager" into Google does in fact lead me to the same answers you found, by the way. As also mentioned in one of the deleted answers: