I wonder how the reputation affected how it all played out. Lots of people threw in minor edits, irrelevant topics etc. in hunt for the insane amount of reputation it offered. After a few weeks the reputation gain was tuned down, but what happened the first days is kinda set in stone. The structure, topics etc., all which is hard to change without a concentrated and directed effort from a lot of people.
so i think the decision to give rep for documentation posts contributed substantially to its failure. Two reasons why i say this:
(i) (as you mentioned) it encouraged early rep mining by novice devs and in at least some case, created a top-level structure that i found suboptimal (to say the least); and
(ii) i think giving rep also provoked the high-rep SO users enough so that they never went near documentation, and so if docs were going to work, it was going to be without the same folks who helped build the Q&A. The OP mentions "New users weren't coming to Documentation" (as consumers) but at least in part that was because not enough quality content....
As for (ii): I’m not exactly high-rep with 1.9K rep, but that is pretty accurate. The rep-mining that went on in the beginning and the resulting atrocious quality turned me off completely from SO Documentation. I don’t answer much, but if I do I put in a quite some effort to provide a well-thought out answer and with Documentation it seemed like that was not appreciated or wanted anymore. I don’t really care for the rep, but I was slightly pissed off that you could get massive gains on the main SO site by posting absolute garbage on Documentation, because for me that felt like SO had jumped the shark.
