You say that we would have closed that question in a heartbeat. You may be right; when the site was in beta and all we had were pro-tem mods, we were very quick to close what we perceived as bad questions.
The role of pro-tem moderator is, in my opinion, somewhat different than the role of regular, elected moderator. In addition to performing the duties of moderator (as defined by freiheit above - dealing with flags, guiding users), a pro-tem mod should guide the site towards something that can be launched out of beta. I believed this meant that we should prune bad questions.
Now that we've had elections and there are three mods who've been given mandates by the community (they've been elected based on the platforms they ran onthe platforms they ran on), a moderator is here to be a human exception handler. Except for the most egregious questions, which this is not, following the lead of the community is, I think, appropriate.
In short: The mods have your back, but the community has to be part of that. How to make that happen is another issue entirely.
