Speaking as a private contributor, rather than as a moderator…
- Our mission is to review code or to have our code reviewed. Any other activity is a distraction from that goal.
- Of course, some overhead is unavoidable, to ensure that the community is aligned and happy.
- Closing off-topic questions is necessary to maintain quality. However, open questions should be the natural state; closing should require the burden of proof. Reopening a question should require less explanation than closing it. Furthermore, on reopening, moderators routinely clean up comments on the question that were instrumental in getting it to an acceptable form. Therefore, you shouldn't expect much of a comment trail on open or reopened questions.
- I'd rather that we not expend effort reviewing the topicality of questions when we could be spending time reviewing code.
- Routinely triggering a meta-discussion over every difference of opinion would generate paperwork and controversy that doesn't need to exist.
What I would like to see
Disagreements will happen on marginal posts, and such disagreement is natural and healthy. All it takes to raise the issue is a simple Meta post:
Should question 59864 have been closed?
I see that Setting up tab bar, navigation, and view controllers in iOS was closed by one moderator and reopened by another. What was the reasoning? I think that it should have remained closed because ….
Any user can raise such a meta-question on any post. It takes about 5 minutes to write a response. The responses can be more democratic as well — it wouldn't be restricted to the moderators directly involved. If we get one of those every few days, it's no big deal.
Mentioning it in our chat room could also work.
On the other hand, responding to one request to re-evaluate our processes takes an extraordinary amount of energy. It takes a lot of effort to craft a non-offensive response. Not to mention, your proposal places an overhead burden on future actions that are considered routine today. I don't think that it is likely to result in any more happiness than posting specific-question questions as needed.
If you are routinely dissatisfied by the explanations given to specific-question posts, then it's time to raise a more general issue.
In summary: more code review, less drama please.