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It's been a long time since this question was asked, and in the meantime there have been lots of changes to the platform.  It turns out we can do most of what you're asking for now, although some key steps are restricted to moderators and aren't yet available to people with other abilities.  I'll describe what is *technically* possible now; how to apply it is largely a matter of *policy*, which should be decided by individual communities.

> - Give trusted users and community moderators the powers to instantly close a post and move it to a "post feedback" area. 
> - This could possibly be a special kind of site category only viewable by those with an interest of helping new users. A slight tweak to the current category system perhaps?
> - The post will instantly disappear from the main site and normal users will no longer see it. These is no longer a need to pile on down votes and close votes.

More specifically, moderators can move a post from one category to another.  The categories must share a tag set and support the same post types, so questions in Q&A can be moved to questions in Workshop (a separate category using the Main tag set).  We can't turn them into articles (and that would add complications for already-existing answers anyway), but moderators can also close questions.

So, in principle, a community that wants to could, today, have the following setup:

- A category called Workshop (or whatever you want to name it).
- Moderators can move questions to Workshop and close them, perhaps with a new close reason that includes some workshop-flavored guidance.
- Moving the question to another category does not change its URL (I just tested this), so if the OP kept it open in a browser, that still works.

The category would remain visible; there's no need for privacy, and if the OP has signed out we don't want to give the impression the question was nuked entirely.  It's a separate category; people who don't want to be involved won't go there.

> - Feedback is given in comments as usual, but now only by people actually interested in helping.

Handled because the question would be closed in the Workshop category.

> - Once the post has been edited into shape by the OP, a copy of the improved question can be restored to the main site by the same users/mods that had the privileges to remove it.

Copies are hard (and would break the URL), but it can be moved back.  This means comment threads would move, so as part of moving it, mods could archive or delete comment threads as appropriate.  We shouldn't place the entire burden here on mods, so people participating in the Workshop should use flags to help identify what should go away.

We can't reset votes as part of this.  We can make votes in the Workshop have 0 effect on reputation, but we can't change the actual votes.

If any community would like to try something like this, please discuss it in your Meta category, including what makes a question suitable for workshopping (how do people know what should be sent there?) and how the community would signal that the question is ok for reopening now.  Some proposed text for the category description (what you see at the top of the category) and close reason would also be great.  It's clear from the voting on this Meta proposal that there are conflicting opinions about the idea, so we'd like to see something resembling consensus from the active participants on a community before doing this.  We are happy to set it up if a community wants to try a workshop.  We're here to help, not to either require or forbid community-level policies.