Q:

How to improve a canonical question, that may appear to be "too broad"?

I keep finding myself posting an [mcve] link in comments to questions with either too much or too little code, but askers seem to be having a hard time actually producing a "Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable Example". To improve the situation, I was planning to submit a Q&A, that contains the shortest possible code needed to implement an application for a small number of common application types1.
While I have no problem coming up with the answer, I'm looking for feedback on the question, so as to not let it fall victim to down- or close-votes, due to various reasons.
This is my proposed question, that could easily be closed off as "too broad", or even "primarily opinion-based":

In a comment I was asked to provide a "Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable Example". My application is huge, and iteratively stripping code appears to be unfeasible. I would rather start at zero, and incrementally begin adding code.
I'm looking for help creating the most minimal application for the following use cases:

Console based application
GUI application
Application that installs a hook

Can you show the most minimal code required to implement each of the aforementioned application types?

The code required to implement either of these is tiny; neither code block will show vertical or horizontal scroll bars (in the desktop version of Stack Overflow), and I believe the question is sufficiently scoped.
Having been burnt in the past with a similar attempt to provide a canonical Q&A to a common question, I would welcome feedback on improving the question prior to posting it. Feedback along the lines of "Appears fine to me" is equally welcome.

1 Windows API only: command line application, GUI application, hook application.

A:

I share your frustration with incomplete or non-minimal examples, but I fear that your idea is doomed to failure.  I guess you did some research to establish the languages and program types that are most lacking a good MCVE, but it's still hard to see how the standard minimal C++ program:
int main() {}

helps somebody whose problem is "my vector elements don't sort properly", for example.  There's nothing there to explain why it's better to construct the vector directly from values rather than to create one and then populate it from an input stream (just to identify one of the many common problems in non-minimal examples).
A tutorial on writing MCVEs is certainly a Good Thing, but it's probably better suited to a blog entry rather than the Q&A format of Meta Stack Overflow.  And it certainly seems (IMO) off-topic for SO itself.

