> the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design.

A Q&A site is a knowledge base. That's just how the information is presented.

If you want a forum — a place where you ask the question to get answered one-on-one — you have countless options for that.

Stack Overflow pages have a different design from that explicitly to encourage building a knowledge base. That's why there's a question at the top and answers underneath it, and why there are not follow-up questions, "me too" posts, discussion of annoyances related to the question, tangential rants, generic socialization etc.

Jeff Atwood was quite clear about this from the beginning.