I have to agree with your assessment of the recent question quality. This may be just due to an influx of new users who think any question they can't answer must be a good one. To be fair, I have no doubt that I made similar mistakes in my early days here. I try to make it a practice to only up-vote questions that clearly comply with the [guidelines.] 11
In my experience those have been few and far between. Some questions look ok but when you tackle it you discover it's really garbage in disguise. Here's an [example] 22 of a question that looks like it might be good at first glance (several upvotes and a bounty offered by a highly respected member), but digging into the details shows that it lacks sufficient information and the solutions the OP claims to have tried almost all point to questions without solutions.