Now, before someone says anything about my past writing skills, I know I was not a great writer back when I started using Stack Exchange in ~2016-2017, and I still am not perfect. I tried editing my past questions, but no luck there.
So you were aware that your writing skills were likely linked to previous downvotes. You know that downvotes can be reversed provided an edit is performed. Knowing this information you still asked a question, revision 1, that still required significant clarification. Thankfully, the question really was never that unclear, I would just argue it just contained a significant amount of information that has no real baring on your issue. I mentioned this all to help you write a more concise detailed high quality question in the future.
Back to today. My current issue is that the ban is now reinstated after my new question, as stated in the Help Center section about question bans I was ready for this, but shouldn't a reputation increase and an upvote or more be enough to lift me out of the block? Upvotes indicate a "useful and clear question", as the tooltip says.
Your question ban was never actually lifted. Once a user reaches the threshold for a question ban they are able to ask a single question every 6 months. The entire reason you are able to ask a question once every 6 months, is to eventually, no longer be question ban and be able to ask questions normally.
So if your last question was in November 2020 and your newest question was in May 2021 that would have been your one question. If you are now unable to ask a new question it means the ban was never lifted.
Since little has been shared about the system itself, there is no way, to know how close you are to NOT being question banned.
What about people who are new to Super User and are not that tech-savvy? Will they get banned because they can't clarify when requested due to poor tech knowledge? Turning to Tom's Hardware Forums, for example, is really not an option, since I can't get any really useful answer(s) there, in contrast to Super User. From my experience, at least.
Users (all users) are expected to perform an adequate amount of research to ask a question that is clear and concise enough so it can be answered. This means using the proper names for technology (I.e PCI-E, etc.) so the community is able to comprehend the question enough to answer it. Questions that are not detailed enough or are unclear are unlikely to get a meaningful answers.
No one is perfect at anything, and I think that Stack Exchange fails to recognize this, especially with their "asking questions is a privilege, not a right" statement. I get that they don't want their communities filled with low quality questions, but they don't have to ban every flaw, in my opinion. Isn't the network there to solve problems?
Sure, but those questions must be answerable, sadly unanswerable questions are not helpful to the community. Questions bans only happen after a continued pattern of asking bad questions, the number isn’t static, and completely user specific. However, it’s absolutely never due to a single bad question, a single bad question simply could not make a user reach the threshold for a question ban.
What normally happens is there are numerous downvoted questions, that might have been deleted by the community or the user themselves, and numerous questions that receive zero votes in either direction. A user with 4 questions like yourself, one that has 2 upvotes, wouldn’t ever be question banned (if those were their only questions). Even if you include a couple deleted questions with 0 votes you still wouldn’t be question banned.
You have at least one question with 0 votes, that received an answer, yet you deemed it unsalvageable and simply deleted it last month. Deleting a question after an answer has been submitted isn’t a positive event. Deleting a question should be reserved for a question that cannot be salvaged by any edit.
As for 3 year old questions, about Windows Vista and Windows XP devices, trying to diagnose those questions today will likely be impossible. Of the questions I saw that had automatically been deleted, were undiagnosed hardware failures, attempting to formulate an answer today would be impossible. It doesn’t appear you are very far into the question ban threshold, but having 7 questions out of 11 questions deleted, isn’t a positive event especially if they received downvotes.
Contributing to the community positively, accepting answers that have been submitted, provided they answered your question are all events that eventually will result in you no longer being question banned.
