I think I figured how current formula breaks the very assumptions it is based upon. Updated the answer about "sticky" questions with this...

> It is quite interesting to observe how "sticky" questions appear like breaking assumptions on which hotness formula is based. These assumptions are laid out in SE blog post Alternate Sorting Orders:

> I find it fairly fascinating that assumptions made more than 3 years ago still work so well... on regular questions. Questions that could have too many answers - non-constructive garbage, gorilla-vs-shark, shopping, all the flavors of vague narq are quickly detected and closed. Regular open questions ("appropriate" ones) tend to have much less than 30 answers indeed.

> But when we look at "sticky" questions, things seem to be different. These questions aren't "inappropriate", otherwise these would be closed long time ago. Still, 10 examples of sticky questions have more than 270 answers total, about 27 average per question, pretty close to "magic 30" mentioned in blog post.

> What gives? Well, evidence demonstrated by voting results, as shown above, brings things back to perspective: only about 1/3 of these answers "have score less than 1/100 of top scored post". This means, 2/3 answers in sticky questions are just a garbage that somehow leaked in (probably because "fake hotness" gave question an unnaturally high exposure in collider).