I'm not convinced this is really unfair. If others cannot benefit from the post, why should the reputation be retained? Reputation is supposed to say something about certain kinds of contributions that exist in the community from a user. (It's a intended as a rough gauge of how much we trust them, so it should be possible to infer it, for the most part, by looking at their contributions.)

Furthermore, while I don't think it's necessarily bad to answer a question you think might get closed and deleted (or just deleted), I don't think there's any good reason to go out of our way to create rules incentivizing the creation of posts that are likely to be invisible due to their parent questions being deleted.

I'm not convinced this is really unfair. If others cannot benefit from the post, why should the reputation be retained? Reputation is supposed to say something about certain kinds of contributions that exist in the community from a user. (It's a intended as a rough gauge of how much we trust them, so it should be possible to infer it, for the most part, by looking at their contributions.)

Furthermore, while I don't think it's necessarily bad to answer a question you think might get closed and deleted (or just deleted), I don't think there's any good reason to go out of our way to create rules incentivizing the creation of posts that are likely to be invisible due to their parent questions being deleted.