Two comments beyond what fedja said.

The first is about the general phenomenon of closure of questions. A lot of posted questions are reasonable but unclear or otherwise flawed. One approach to these questions is to vote to close, citing the flaw, ask the poster to fix the flaw, and thus reopen. The second approach is to ask the poster to fix the flaw first, and only close later if they refuse to do so. I think the first is very unwelcoming but the second is necessary.

I don't fully understand the timeline in your case but it looks closer to the second. In particular, Anthony Quas gave a comment pointing out what needed to be clarified, and the question wasn't deleted until days later (after, according to other comments, you deleted and then undeleted it instead of changing anything).

The first is about presentation. Your question was presented in word problem format, without an associated purely mathematical formulation. This led to confusion as the word problem was ambiguous, but it also led people to mistrust your question as what a math researcher, absolutely including a grad student, would typically do is give formulas in addition to (or instead of) the word-problem motivation. You can find many examples of questions on MO that do this.

I expect if you had posted a formal statement you would have gotten a dramatically better response.

Two comments beyond what fedja said.

The first is about the general phenomenon of closure of questions. A lot of posted questions are reasonable but unclear or otherwise flawed. One approach to these questions is to vote to close, citing the flaw, ask the poster to fix the flaw, and thus reopen. The second approach is to ask the poster to fix the flaw first, and only close later if they refuse to do so. I think the first is very unwelcoming but the second is necessary.

I don't fully understand the timeline in your case but it looks closer to the second. In particular, Anthony Quas gave a comment pointing out what needed to be clarified, and the question wasn't deleted until days later (after, according to other comments, you deleted and then undeleted it instead of changing anything).

The second is about presentation. Your question was presented in word problem format, without an associated purely mathematical formulation. This led to confusion as the word problem was ambiguous, but it also led people to mistrust your question as what a math researcher, absolutely including a grad student, would typically do is give formulas in addition to (or instead of) the word-problem motivation. You can find many examples of questions on MO that do this.

I expect if you had posted a formal statement you would have gotten a dramatically better response.