Thank you for your response.

The main reason I believe the general goal of having directly built-in functions (such as buttons) for converting (or even “refactoring”) a single post into multiple separate posts is of value or interest is because of what you might call “user flow”: true, I could edit my posts meticulously before posting them. From a user perspective, would my experience of using the site be more or less identical, if I could refactor my posts with convenience functions within the site, vs. refactoring them outside, in a word processor? In my opinion, it would not, due to what I will call “user flow”. Arguably, even the mere fact that a certain button is accessible under a side-menu as opposed to directly visible on-screen at all times, changes the user experience of a software application - the mere fact that one must exert that tiny extra little 1 kJ of mental executive functioning, decision making, visual scanning, and clicking, in order to activate that function (…)

changes how the user will feel using that function, how often they will choose to do so, etc.

I can go into more detail on this point of view. For now I wanted to say that to me, this is a functionality which would very much lend itself to what I currently understand a goal of Codidact to be - a system that encourages and facilitates that people edit posts for their longevity and readability as information resources. So to me, built-in refactoring functions could be as topical here as special video editing functions in a video editing software application. Sure, one can always say, “Well, you can just do it via the following alternative method, so that feature would therefore not be required.” I would say, the question is not if a feature is necessary, since the case can be made that virtually all software is ultimately unnecessary. The question is if it facilitates something that a user may find useful, I suppose. Personally, I would find it possibly useful.

You're completely ignoring the point that we don't want to see all those edits. Activities like you suggest would have to bump those posts that were changed. That could drown out the new content that we do want to know about.

We don't want to dissipate volunteer energy on all those intermediate versions that aren't really ready to answer or otherwise worth spending time on. Maybe there is a slight convenience to you, but that is far outweighed by the annoyance to everyone else.

I agree this would be a distraction from questions that are already ready to answer.

There's something similar on Code Golf Codidact. The Sandbox category where people can post ideas for coding challenges and get feedback and slowly improve them until they are ready to post to the Challenges category. This is important for Code Golf because writing a clear, concise, unambiguous challenge specification is difficult. It seems far less important for questions, which are easier to write and less problematic to edit after they have been posted.

If we had this functionality at all I would definitely want it to be a separate category, rather than posting unfinished drafts in the main Q&A category. Any Codidact community can have a new category set up if there is community support for it on Meta. However, as far as I'm aware there is not yet functionality for a user to migrate a post from one category to another, so this may not meet your goal.

I think there is a misunderstanding that I was advocating a feature where you publicly post half-finished drafts of ideas to be collaborated and refined with others, as some sort of other category of post type. The core focus of my post is about built-in refactoring functions or buttons (or at least one). This applies to any question or answer, whether it was written hastily or not. The idea is to add a convenience function for the process of breaking a multipart question into separate question posts. You could do this for other people’s questions that you are moderating, not just your own. I am not saying that I insist we have this at all, just clarifying what the idea in my post is. It’s fine with me if people don’t want it.