My thoughts on this issue are as follows. Please bear in mind that I have almost no idea what useful tools that the moderators have at their disposal.
A) If the top answer were edited and broken into versions pointing to answers applicable to them it would make things easier for users. The editing job would be easier and could be shared if the answer was a Community post.
The downside to this approach is the possible departure from intent. I'm unsure how @Oli would feel about having his answer hijacked in such a fashion. Possibly relieved from the burden of comments on it, possibly not.
Another way to deal with issues like this is organically. What I've done on occasion in the past when there were a multitude of answers to a users question is try to point them directly to the one I though most likely helpful as in for 16.04 try this answer or this one. By driving people to the correct answer votes on those answers will increase over time. This approach has the benefits of not requiring mod intervention and sidesteps the possible issue of stepping on the intent of a highly respected answer. The downside to this approach is the time it would take to become effective could be extensive.
A third way of dealing with this would be to create a new canonical Q & A that addressed the question from the perspective of recent releases, but this would require a great deal of effort (I would assume) by a moderator to move answers related to recent releases to the new Q & A if loss of intellectual capital were to be avoided. The downside to this approach is likely the workload placed an an already overworked moderator who may alreadt be suffering from the stress induced by attempted perfection.
