HN crowdsourcing is a pretty reasonable strategy for entities that cannot reliably identify & hire 1+ rockstar employee(s) and/or VARs to cover the compute, networking, storage, electrical, environmental, etc. If you can rationally evaluate the HN comments you should get pretty close to the best, cutting-edge advice. Whereas when you are small and you listen to 1 or 2 VARs and/or 1-2 internal employees you can expect, on average, to get average advice. Or advice that was excellent 2-3 years ago but is now out-of-date due to HW/SW progress that the employee/VAR is unaware of.
Cutting-edge and availability aren't really always best friends. For example cutting edge routing and switching (the latest products, fabric, SDN's, MC-LAG, etc) are notorious for failures and outages.
Average is not the appropriate word, however I'll use your word. I'd rather have, and so would every enterprise out there, rather have average advice based on tried and true solutions that costs 10% more with 99.99 to 99.999% availability than cutting edge, saved 10-20% with 99.8% availability. The downtime alone can (and does) kill reputations of sites like GitLab.com (and others).
