I think that the "unclear what you're asking" close reason is being overused for questions people dislike, or which don't explain themselves well, even when the question isn't unclear.
Going through all of the "unclear what you're asking" close votes, I think this is the full list for the past month (from the closed votes queue, so excluding reopened posts and posts closed by a moderator):
Is an employee obligated to leave in the middle of the day to honor his father (deleted)
If a jewish man "marries" a non-jewish woman in a goyish court, can zealots attack him?
Can a woman divorce her husband and then convert to Judaism?
I think this is a problem because
6/8 of these questions weren't unclear to me, subjectively. (The first and fourth question in the list would, in my opinion, fall under the old "not a real question" close reason.)
2/8 (6, 8) of these questions were received positively (score of +1 or more). More people thought that the question "shows research effort; it is useful and clear" than who thought "this question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful."
5/8 (2, 4, 6, 7, 8) of these questions received at least one answer (now scoring +8, +0, +4, +0, +6). Evidently the question wasn't unclear, if someone understood it.
4/6 (1, 2, 3, 4) of these questions were answered, or their assumption was challenged, in the comments (often in the very comment that declared it "unclear," which makes it seem as if the question was considered so stupid that it had to be closed). Those should have been answers, not comments. If the question has a wrong assumption, it just means the person who asked didn't know something that could have been given to answer the question.
5/8 (1, 2, 4, 7, 8) questions were by someone with <50 reputation who doesn't necessarily know what peoples' standards are for questions. Anecdotally, I see a lot of new users saying that they don't understand why people are "playing dumb" and not understanding the question. Ideally, a question should be self-contained and not require outside knowledge in order to answer it. But lacking that, it's still answerable.
Looking through the top questions, I think many would have been closed by the standards people are applying to "unclear what you're asking" these days. I don't think such questions should be discouraged.
Regardless of site policy, people don't like having their questions closed. The Stack Overflow blog agrees with this (with regard to the "closed" terminology):
Having your question closed feels lousy; there’s no doubt about it. Now, we don’t care as much about nice as we do about quality – but that’s not a real dichotomy. We can be more constructive in conveying our standards without lowering them one bit. And we need to, because whether we liked it or not:
Having your question closed feels like a personal attack."Closing" has now been changed to "putting on hold," but I still think that this is potentially true. Closing will, no doubt, remain part of the site, but I think we should exercise more caution when doing something that can be construed as a personal attack.
I think that this close reason (among others) is being used as a super downvote (mentioned here in this post), and that we should have a little more restraint before voting to close a question as unclear when it can be answered. Does anyone else think this is or isn't problematic?