@ArturMeinild yay!

"The upcoming LTS release... seems like a good excuse to organize workshops." ... Uh, you know there's a much, much bigger reason (that's also similar to the last time's reason) coming up (though we might be starting a bit earlier)

I'd prefer the other way - language as a synonym, as language-support seems to be clearer in the intent just from the name of the tag.

To me, your answer basically is the equivalent of "Q: I'm having problems filtering text with grep. A: Me too. I got it working with the Silver Searcher. Maybe also <some random idea>". I'd have downvoted and flagged that for deletion as very low quality.

Considering OP's problem is with the software centre in the first place, it's rather funny you'd assume people would use it to get something else to solve the problem - for all they know, it might not be possible to do that at that point. To me it seemed like you were asking for Ubuntu to enable automatic updates, not the user, who's have problems with getting updates to work in the first place.

@GlenM then say that? They might be familiar with the software store, but there's no reason to assume that they know what synaptic is these days.

I was able to install the updates by <some tool not available by default> should at least mention how that tool is to be obtained or used. Otherwise the majority of your "answer" was composed of "me too" + "random feature request for something that already exists".

(To be clear, I am not interested in getting into such arguments either, which is why I downvoted this post.)

I didn't vote on that answer, but it's kinda obvious why someone might though. It doesn't show how to get the feature that OP is looking for, but some other related feature. Now you might want to argue about how related it is and how sincere your effort is and all, but none of that changes that it isn't what's asked. (Of course OP might still upvote and even accept your answer.) And whoever downvoted it probably doesn't want to get into that argument.

Who's going to pay for the development of these features?

xkcd.com/927

"Developing on Ubuntu" is explicitly on topic only insofar as the development involves something specific to Ubuntu - generic programming questions go on SO (or elsewhere). OP's question seems to qualify since they are facing a problem they don't see on another distro, however.

And when the answer for something is the same again and again, we do close, usually as a duplicate, but since in this case closing as a dupe would just be disputed by the OP because they'd say "that's not what I'm asking", so having a custom close reason seems just fine for me. In fact, closing as a dupe of a "don't do this"-type of question has been tried on U&L, and it didn't work out.

I did not say they are. I said I see such questions often get a number of both, even in the case where they do give reasons, because what those reasons boil down to often and usually is "because somebody else said so" (could be a boss, prof, some other third party, whatever). I'm fine with the close reason being there even for cases where good reasons exist because we are more than happy to help with them with upgrading - it's the one exception in the close reason. If they can't just yet, then let them wait until they can.