That's interesting. I also found that my more difficult questions never got answered.
Perhaps a fix to create an incentive to answer hard questions would be to create a ratio to estimate difficulty (how much time has gone by without an accepted or high-voted answer? number of views that don't add a good answer?) and then give more reward points to someone who successfully answers a "hard" question.
There is the "bounty" system[0]: you (or anyone else) can offer up some of your own reputation as a bonus for answering the question. (For example: this Haskell question[1], and this C/GCC question[2] have had no/poor answers for a while, and the bounties have prompted more/better answers.)
I've had this happen to me a lot, but I also have noticed that sometimes I see an interesting question that deserves a long answer and I want to answer it, but I have this nagging suspicion someone else is already working on an answer and by the time I write mine theirs will already have received some kind of critical mass of upvotes and my work will not get any upvotes at all.
The best strategy seems to be incremental editing. Post a short and to-the-point answer first and then edit it to expand and add finer points. This way your answer is already competing with others even as you write it (properly).
It feels slightly weird to be forced to employ such a tactic, but at SO's scale it might just be necessary.
It's not weird, it's intentional, and desired. The short and to-the-point answer is marginally more helpful if it arrives sooner, because it solves the problem quickly, so it will tend to earn a little more reputation. Coming back later and embellishing the answer with details, sample code, whatever, and you will earn a flood of well-deserved reputation. Doing both--providing a quick answer and then embellishing the details so that the Internet has a great resource--is the ideal outcome and therefore rewarded with the most reputation.
I tried to do incremental editing of a self-answered question. As I was editing and improving the post, within 30 minutes of originally posting, my question was closed for not being a real question. Which was true, the original question was a problem statement.
I continued to improve the post, including the feedback from downvoters. However, I had to flag the post to have a mod reopen the question and none of the downvoters have returned to modify their vote.
It's annoying to end up with negative feedback after attempting to be helpful and taking time to improve a post. Maybe encourage closers to come back after a post is reopened?
bookmark it (using the so interface - click on the star thing) and look again in a day or so. by then it will be clear if it's going to be answered or not.
main trouble with this is that some simple, dumb answer may have been marked correct by then.
The marked answer may be changed, so there's still hope. The problem is when the question is asked by someone who won't be back to see your new awesome answer because they've already moved on.
There needs to be an embargo period where votes don't show up for the first 15-30mins to stop the snowballing effect of the first answer - like with real election results
This was actually discussed to death on StackOverflow's Meta site in the "old days".
The reason they stick to this system: They prefer people answering quickly. This is the perfect incentive to get people to answer ASAP.
And to the argument "but I have a much better, more thought out answer", most people will say "Yes, but I want my answer now. I don't care about the history behind git, I want to know how to stage removed files".
But in the early days there were fewer people asking and answering.
Now there are a larger number of answerers and a bigger pool of people wanting/needing to gain rep by writing the quickest (but not necessarily correct) answer. This leads to a state where people don't bother clicking on questions with an answer on the front page - because they are already 'behind' in the race
Perhaps a fix to create an incentive to answer hard questions would be to create a ratio to estimate difficulty (how much time has gone by without an accepted or high-voted answer? number of views that don't add a good answer?) and then give more reward points to someone who successfully answers a "hard" question.