Some time after the Great code-trolling Purge, a huge wave of popularity-contest underhanded questions emerged.
Are some of the underhanded questions too broad and hence facing similar issues to those of code-trolling?
Bad Underhanded question (too broad?)
An example of an underhanded question which I found too broad was the now-deleted one called "Print an unexpected obscenity". The task was to write a program to print any insult, provided that the insult-printing is sufficiently obfuscated and undetectable.
Is this particular question too broad, and too much like code-trolling? It attracted a number of answers whose output was well-documented. For example, the output of this much-upvoted Bash/otherUnixShell solution is easy to predict, and it isn't very subtle. (I'm aware that I'm not really approaching this with a sense of humour here. I did find it funny though.)
You think you deserve an entry in the manual of manliness? Let's see:
man you
Output:
No manual entry for you!
Clearly, this isn't very underhanded.
TL;DR: Is it too broad to ask for any insult? And how unexpected does it need to be to qualify?
Better Underhanded question
Write a program that makes 2 + 2 = 5 was a very fun question. I think it is objective enough. The task is to write a program which appears to calculate 2+2 (not too broad; asking someone to make a specific calculation is about as specific as it gets), but misuse some language feature to make it output 5. My answer is here.
TL;DR: Some underhanded questions can be as objective as popularity-contest gets. Scoring can't be done with any tag other than popularity-contest AFAIK as it is a contest for creativity.
The only code-golf underhanded question doesn't meet the criteria for underhanded.
TL;DR
Some of the underhanded questions are too broad and too much like code-trolling. To an extent, underhanded is the new code-trolling. I wouldn't kill all of it with fire though. Some of the questions are good and objective. But others are too broad and hence too much like code-trolling.