Reading the site, one finds that there are a number of questions which start out innocently enough: The question-asker is possibly only looking for a straight forward answer to his narrowly tailored, possibly computational, question and is pleasantly surprised -- indeed, we all are -- with a magisterial and deeply insightful answer which is recognized as such and promptly highly voted up by the community. Or, rather more properly, by the community that reads the sorts of questions he answers. These answers, to me, are the stuff of lasting intuition; some of them make me want to get out a pad and paper to immediately begin applying their insights; I'll probably eagerly quote some of those ideas contained therein in the future to my friends.
Now, one can typically find many of these kinds of answers by looking at the profiles of the highest rep users; our two highest-rep users are in particular notorious for them, and there are plenty of gems to be found in the profiles of, say, the top 25 highest rep users. One might also click through to the "nice answer" badges, and one might find a couple of recent ones there as well. (Just like in Google's search results, I'd bet that no one clicks past the first page).
There are, however, a couple of problems with these approaches. For example, clicking through to badge and user pages only gives you the titles of answers, which most of the time, are typically oblique because the people posting their questions are in a hurry for responses. Recently, I've been trying to remedy that situation a bit by renaming the titles of particular questions that have very nice answers to guide future searchers (I think commenter Bill Dubuque, who has is a pedagogical bent, is doing the same same). Moreover, in the badge pane, the questions are rank-ordered by date, not insightfulness, and worse one has no a priori way of telling how useful answers to individual questions might be to one personally. So my very first feature request is that nice answers and famous questions and such should be tagged.
There is also the problem that most people here are not generalists: They only answer topics they think they know well, and, since they are not amongst the highest rep answers, at least some percentage of their answers will be pedestrian. And, because voting tends to be populist, and led by the lowest common denominator of the site's user base, vote rank is not entirely synonymous with quality, as has been noted before, at least between tag specialities. People who post really remarkable answers to questions to set theory, like one user I discovered from one of my recent questions for example, aren't going to be as acclaimed by the community as those who specialize in number theory -- that's just the way it is. And finally and mostly, for some people the perfect question and the inspiration to give a truly classic answers only comes together like that of a lightning strike -- rarely.
This could all be rectified if we had a wiki-like "best-of" page where resident experts, possibly as determined by intra-tag rep ranking or rep thresholds, could highlight particularly nice answers for different communities, as organized by topic. There would be very little or no commentary or discussion there, so as not to create a detrimental "fork" against the main purpose of the site. They would be able to pick out hidden gems, and collate them for the benefit of future readers, which might help attract experts for undeserved communities like, say, algorithms and theoretical statistics. I've noticed that this is already being done organically, through comments to the main answer, and rarely, in community-wiki type posts, but it would be really nice to get something official from StackExchange management.
