<p>OP here. I had no idea this discussion existed until I just now randomly clicked on it in the &quot;Featured on Meta&quot; window on the side of the website, so I'm late to the party.</p>
<p>The previous question was indeed based on the same problem <em>description</em>, but the <em>problem itself</em> was different. It is common knowledge that, in such a case, best practice is indeed to post a <em>new</em> question. As you can infer from my extensive history on stats.stackexchange (and other stackexchange websites), I'm familiar with the rules, and so I would not have deleted the question and reposted the same one again (if anything, I would have just undeleted the deleted question).</p>
<p>The reason I deleted the previous question (based on the same problem description) is as follows:</p>
<ol>
<li>I figured out the answer.</li>
<li>The comments were full of various discussion but not really substantively helpful, and this discussion activity eventually died down.</li>
<li>No one had posted an answer, and there was no indication that anyone would post an answer (see 2.).</li>
</ol>
<p>So it seemed to me that the question was just a waste of space, since it would keep getting bumped by the system as a 'zombie question', and so the best course of action was to just delete it.</p>
