Is "Does Theory/model X align with data?"-type of questions off-topic in Economics.se?

Question

The question "Which school of economic thought aligns with past data better: Keynesian or Austrian?" has been put on hold as (generating answers that would be) "primarily opinion-based". The standard text accompanying this on-hold reason reads

"Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise."

"Alignment with data?" is one activity where Economics routinely "generates some degree of opinion based on expert experience", but alongside "facts, references, or specific expertise".

Moreover, "Alignment with data?" is one of the major challenges and points of assessment of economic models.

So I don't see why the question in question was closed as "primarily opinion-based". As I stated in the answer I provided, the question was rather "too broad" -but sometimes it is useful to say "this is difficult to assess" or "there does not appear to be any serious work on the matter". Sometimes, interesting questions may have "disappointing" answers like that, which nevertheless, are still useful.

I believe it would be helpful if the people that voted to close for the "opinion-based" reason shared their viewpoints as answers to this thread, so that maybe some collective guidance emerges as to how we should approach and assess future questions of this type.

Answer 1

I guess the issue is exactly what you stated in your answer:

First, the "empirical usefulness" of Keynesian, neo-Keynesian, meta-Keynesian, post-Keynesian, post-meta-Keynesian, after-Keynesian, beyond-Keynesian, etc models and theory strands, is one of the "everyday issues" in Economics, and there can be no single verdict on the matter

I don't think that most of these quantitative papers would give us anything but noise. This can be seen from how often theories have been "falsified" by data, only leading to followers of that theory saying "Yes, but this is a special case, and doesnt cound, because XYZ".

To the extent that the best answer - in my opinion - is an answer about there being no answers, and most likely many answers would rather be in style of the other answer (i.e., very political), I voted for closing. "There being no good answer" is sufficiently short for being put as a comment, and closing it prevents unscientific/opinion-based answers.

But I also see how, if we trust on having sufficient activity, we can let these questions open and down-vote the "bad" answers. Given my bad experience in the minimum wage question (many bad answers only at -1, and one relatively bad one - by my standards - even at +5), I chose to rather vote strictly.