I'm noticing building support for the idea of removing the "math problem" close reason. It's come up in discussion on meta, and has been brought up in chat a few times.

I can definitely see where support for removing this close reason would come from. Those questions which are truly off-topic can simply be marked with the "off topic" close reason; math-related questions would (should?) be segregated by quality through voting rather than by close reason. I'm also growing increasingly convinced that it is acting as a means of introducing unintentional favoritism into the system, and I can see the argument that the close reason is doing more harm than good as a result.

I'm still on the fence about removing the close reason entirely, though. Still, looking back at the original reasoning for rendering math "problems" off-topic, it looks to me like the problem could be solved with downvotes alone, and that a close reason might not have been necessary.

Should we remove this close reason? If so, how do we, as a community, handle the quality of math problems and math puzzles (wherever the distinction, if it exists, may lie) going forward?