I agree the majority of the questions lack essential information. However, if you don't feel the beat, a metronome doesn't work. In other words: A format for collecting appropriate information is only useful to improve or standardize a quality you already have, which is not the case mostly in the questions you are referring to.

You would probably have more useless information to read, because most inexperienced people simply don't know what is essential information to their question, format or not. Nor do they even understand that their question is a duplicate if they see a similar question. 

At the same time, for people who *do* know how to ask a question, a general (forcing) format would be a silly and bureaucratic thing that never fits, since a question could be anything; asking for general insight, a solution for a general problem that occurs or very case specific.

I guess simply asking for appropriate additional information, if possible, is what we need to (try to) do, which does not prevent some questions from being unanswerable.