Closing a more general challenge as a duplicate

Question

Recently there has been a bit of debate as to whether this question is a duplicate of this question. So I though I would bring it to meta where we can have a constructive conversation, not only about those particular questions, but about questions like them in general.

Here is roughly what is happening so you don't have to read through the questions to get the idea:

The original question is a really hard question, at the time when the second question was asked it was unanswered (it has since been answered however). The second question is a lot more permissive it generalizes the task and scores answers on how close they are to completing the original task. That means that any answer from the original challenge will score a perfect score on the newer challenge.

This by the letter of the law runs afoul of our consensus on duplicates:

[W]hen we assess whether a challenge is a duplicate of another, we should ask ourselves "Can answers from one question be copied over to the other with little or no modification and still be competitive?"

However this is a tiny bit unsatisfactory for a couple of reasons:

1. The newer question is a lot more approachable. Having a lower bar for entry users can compete without having to solve the really difficult challenge that was the older one while ambitious users can still compete at the higher level. This seems good for our site, and thus it seems detrimental to close the newer one as a duplicate.

2. Some answers on the newer question can not be beaten by answers from the older challenge. Because of the difficulty of the older challenge it may be impossible to answer it in some languages that may be usable for the newer challenge. Since we view contests as being separated by language these answers would be competitive, perhaps even unbeatable, on the newer challenge but not allowed on the older challenge. It seems like we should have a place for these answers and the old question does not provide that.

So while these two specific questions are of no huge importance to the site it would be nice to have a general policy for this sort of conundrum.

I am not asking how the current policy applies to this situation. There have been some minor details pointed out about how the challenges are different, but for the sake of this question on meta I would like to assume that they are in fact duplicates under the current policy, and ask whether the application of the policy is good here or if we should amend the policy in some way.

Answer 1

The purpose of the policy is that I shouldn't be able to reuse the same answer to multiple questions. It avoids negative effects including:

1. Accusations of rep farming by submitting the same answer multiple times
2. Accusations of stealing someone else's answer from the first question
3. A multi-bump effect where whenever I improve my score I have to edit two answers and in so doing bump two questions.

In my opinion, the appropriate way to handle a situation where hard question A has been unanswered for a couple of months and I have an idea for easier variant B for which answers to A will be unbeatable is to engage the author of question A and propose that they edit it to variant B, if necessary using their original scoring criterion as a tie-breaker.