this isn’t a question I am interested in
That is not a close reason and never has been.
We want tooling that lets those signals exist independently, and we want curator input on what that actually looks like in practice.
There is no need for an “I’m not interested” signal, just don’t look at the question. We already have voting and closure, and you know very well how both work in practice.
We want to decouple quality signaling from the asker’s ability to receive an answer
If no one can understand the question enough to give an answer, it is definitionally low-quality. It’s utterly useless. Additionally, downvotes and close votes are different things!
We want to prevent the “hard lock” failure mode where questions are closed against a “duplicate” that may not actually solve the asker’s specific problem.
The entire point of duplicate closure is that the linked question solves the asker’s problem. If it doesn’t, then whoever closed it was just wrong and it should be reopened. No system changes are necessary.
Hoid, I have to assume you know these things already, and someone told you to put that in. It would be very helpful though if you and other CMs could relay this and other basic information about how curation works to whoever is making these decisions.