Marcus, this feature has been beneficial to you me doesn't mean it is beneficial to me. Now, if we are talking of democratic decision making, there was no such thing.
I am also not sure, each case of this severe duplication problem is different, therefore need own topics. There have been severe ones reported in the recent past, including myself.
Do you know of a procedure to delete unused questions due to this duplication problem? I am speaking of a site which has 700k questions, probably 90% of them are duplicates.