Whether or not you find an already existing answer for a question on stackexchange strongly depends on which keywords (or tags) you use to search. Sometimes basically identically questions are asked in different contexts. Having that said more questions on the same topic improve the visibility of solutions due to different wording.

Especially novice users wouldn't understand that a solution that works in a given context provides also a solution to their problem. I would suggest to accept the variants like:

How to do a physic simulation (Bad example because of the tutorial style they ask for):

• for a wrecking ball?
• for a chain?

If one answers the question he should link the other answers (perhaps more detailed) as related. I don't want to know how many questions we have for rendering issues due to dups, wrong normals, textures without UV-map.

Could this be why our answer ratio is doing so poorly?

This should be another question.

Whether or not you find an already existing answer for a question on stackexchange strongly depends on which keywords (or tags) you use to search.

More answers on a questions improve the visibility of a solutions due to different wording. This is also encouraged by the Answer Ratio 'performance indicator' which is currently 1.5 and should be at least 2.5

The best answer is usually voted to the top. IMHO we shouldn't delete dups this would worsen the answer ratio and searchability. Once the answer ratio is above 3 we could consider this again