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.] [1]

In my experience those have been few and far between.

[1]: http://askubuntu.com/help/how-to-ask