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The reasoning is pretty simple, closing a question as a duplicate of something asked in the past that didn't get an answer either is .. rude, and often self-defeating. It basically says "That person has no chance of getting an answer, so we'll make sure you don't, either" This makes sense nearly universally. But this is a research level site, and I realize ...

Per the OP's request I am posting information from the above comments as an answer. (Although personally I think that this addresses the OP's concerns only partially.) In some cases questions can be merged. Merging is possible when the notation and terminology in both questions are identical, or at least similar enough that the answer still makes sense even ...

We have merged questions before. I seem to remember doing this many years ago in order to remove some unwanted consequence of a bounty (but I am unable to find the relevant discussion on the tea site). As you might expect, the text of one of the questions disappears forever. Edit in response to Martin Sleziak's comment: It seems my information is well out ...

One, perhaps silly, approach would be to put an "answer" on the original question (thereby bumping it on the front page) stating that this question has been re-asked (and give a link). Then the new one could be closed as a duplicate, thus linking back to the original question. The spurious answer could be moved into a comment to maintain the link to the ...

What about the option to merge the original with the duplicate? If the original has no answer then the merge should be pretty straight-forward. The new question could have the wording of the original and the wording of the re-ask, perhaps under separate headers. The merge could also port over comments from the original thread. I don't know if the new ...