In short: the commenter can always post an answer. You cannot delete an accepted answer unless the question owner unaccepts it. Points cannot be transferred (except you set a bounty on the question and award it to the commenter when they post their answer), but people can vote up the new correct answer.

Of course no valuable answer should be deleted via question deletion. -- Though on the other hand I doubt that it is good practice to unnecessarily clutter the site with questions which are not well-thought and answers which merely point that out.

I think this site is the right place for such enquiries -- but it might help if you provide a link to your removed question, such that people can see what you worry about. In general, editing a question or changing tags is in no way negative feedback. Negative feedback are downvotes, close votes, delete votes, low quality flags and negative comments -- which of these did you get, and how often? -- In any case, I think you should not worry in any way about posting on MO -- I see you have asked 20 well-received questions and given 2 well-received answers so far.

@GerryMyerson Meanwhile the question has been autodeleted again since it is still closed and has non-positive score. To resurrect the question, it would take 3 undelete votes, 3 more reopen votes and either 5 upvotes (to reach score 1) or an answer, in order to permanently prevent it from being autodeleted again.

I think a more important question here is what the net value of the funding actually is -- i.e. after deducting reasonable wages for the time people spend on writing applications for these funds (both successful and unsuccessful ones) -- and how that changes over the years.

It seems that the Community user sometimes performs minor edits without bumping the post -- see e.g. here -- the Community user edited the answer 2 days ago, but the last activity of the thread was 9 months ago. -- Or do I misinterpret what happened there?

@GeraldEdgar: If everybody can do this, then yes. -- But I doubt this would be the case if it were a privilege earned at some decent number of points (3k?, 5k?, 10k?).

As far as I can tell, there is no way to see how many people viewed a particular post -- rather only a viewcount is shown. When the same person reloads the page after a certain time (15 minutes?), then this is counted again.

Can one upvote news like this -- or is there a risk that the meaning of an upvote here is misunderstood?

If you would like to avoid the standard comment, you could go to the post, flag it as 'not an answer', then possibly add a comment yourself, and finally choose 'delete - no comment needed' in the review queue.

If you flag an answer as 'not an answer', no comment is generated. The standard comments come from the 'low quality posts' review queue -- there (if the post is an answer) the possible choices are 'Looks OK', 'Delete -- no comment needed' and 'Delete' with a few different standard comments to choose from. If 6 people choose one of the 'Delete' options before 2 (or sometimes 1) have chosen 'Looks OK', then the answer gets deleted.

It's certainly true that the text of the standard comment doesn't fit well -- but choosing "looks ok" in the low quality posts review queue seems also not right if the answer should rather be a comment.

I think firstly such a collective thread would not be automatically known or easily be found by people who wish to make an appropriate enquiry, and secondly, starting a new thread in each case provides better visibility. I'd rather suggest to introduce a corresponding tag, if needed -- tags can also be added afterwards by people who know about them. -- The same remarks apply also to existing collective threads like e.g. "Requests for reopen votes" etc..

You think the question should be reopened, but doesn't deserve an upvote? -- I think it seems a bit weird to vote to reopen a question with no upvote, but 4 downvotes ... .