It was more that the owners had a very different idea of the site to what most people wanted to use it for, they wanted to create something akin to Wikipedia of code while most people wanted their programming questions answered. I definitely think a lot of the community had an attitude problem, but the wider problem is more that the users and owners were talking about totally different sites for the most part.

I don’t think their ideal was ever realistic to be honest, the main problem I had with SO was less the reflexive rudeness and power-tripping and more that the community seemed a bit delusional about the basic passage of time and the evolution of industry practice. You’d often see a comically obsolete answer as the canonically accepted one, and if you had a question about something even tangentially related to that canonical answer some smarmy little goblin would come along to close it as a duplicate. It wasn’t very good at what it purported to be, much less what most users thought it was for.