Comment by reissbaker

The last two proposed options — "Naïvely, I would think that sshd would work for that" or "So, I probably would've tried using sshd here. Would that not work out?" — sound pretty reasonable to me. It makes it clear the implication is that the questioner assumes that the problem is likely more complex than is obvious on the surface and is curious, as opposed to passive-aggressively implying the author is an idiot.

I used to work in infra at $LARGE_TECH_COMPANY, and while it's true that sometimes people meant the type 2 "I genuinely am curious" question, there was often a deluge of type 1 "you're an idiot why didn't you do X" for specific decisions that we'd made that made sense at the scale we operated at, but where the problems we encountered with the "simple" approach wouldn't show themselves at small scale (and thus most engineers wouldn't encounter e.g. in side projects or if they'd worked at smaller companies) — especially because these kinds of questions often arose when someone was frustrated and having issues with something we built or maintained. It's not so much that maintainers are overly sensitive with the "just do X" type questions; it's that maintainers pattern-match against the large number of "you're doing it wrong" versions of the question and the few genuine ones have a hard time differentiating themselves. Either of the last two do a good job differentiating themselves from the noise, I think.