See also Do we want resource recommendation questions?, Are software recommendation questions on topic? and to a lesser extent When are software-recommendation questions on topic?.
As pointed out elsewhere, we already have tags that are meant to be about various "recommend me something" questions.
Several other sites have specific standards for what they consider to be acceptable recommendation questions. See for example those of Physics and Software Recommendations.
Given that there is a fair consensus for us accepting questions on the form "please recommend me an X to do Y" (where X so far has primarily been software), we should have a set of standards for what makes such a question acceptable, and ideally what makes for a good answer to such a question. As far as I can tell, we have so far been rather non-specific in this regard.
What should those standards be?
Please post separate answers discussing the questions and the answers respectively, as the standards for each are likely to be different.