I was thinking about this after reading these great slide decks by Jeff Atwood, which reemphasized to me that SO is not meant to be a forum or support site, and it is meant to be not just a QA site, but something that generates general reusable articles.
I think closing these questions is the clearest path for this site to survive and flourish. The test needs to be not "would I like to help this person?" but rather "is having a page about this question going to be useful in future?"
I think AU needs a strong direction or consensus on this otherwise there may be pushback that it's unhelpful or negative to close a question when the person's clearly having trouble. Perhaps just closing with a clear note will be enough.