In my experience this can happen for two distinct reasons (not exclusively):

1. The StackOverflow Reflex, where the person responding doesn't believe you've actually explored other solutions sufficiently because in their experience the vast majority of the time the person asking for help hasn't actually explored other solutions effectively. This may feel like bad faith (from either side), but it could just be the asker's inexperience with other solutions that cause them to not apply them correctly.

2. They don't know how to do Y, but they know how to do X really well so they want to make sure you haven't missed anything in your attempt to make X work. Remember that different people have different expertise and may want to try to help solve your problem even if they don't know how to solve it with your chosen solution.

I think askers often don't recognize that explaining why T-X won't work in their case is actually very helpful to fully understand the problem, even if the person helping ends up solving Y directly. If you're asking for help solving a complex problem, sometimes you have to teach the problem to the person helping you. And that's ok.

>The StackOverflow Reflex, where the person responding doesn't believe you've actually explored other solutions sufficiently because in their experience the vast majority of the time the person asking for help hasn't actually explored other solutions effectively.

Heh. Encountered this just the other day. I asked a question about how come an ugly kludge was faster in Python for doing a particular task, and mentioned that I had tested this using timeit and perf.

I got a bunch of answers back that assumed I was doing something stupid that I didn't really need to do. Needless to say, the code samples they posted all ran 5-10 times slower than my kludge, which means they hadn't even tested them.

I agree, and there's no simple way to signal that you really do know your stuff and really have investigated other solutions. The one or two times I tried this, responders became slightly hostile after a bit, implying that I didn't know what I was talking about, that I was doing things wrong, that my constraints weren't real, etc.

It was probably as frustrating for them as it was for me.

I've found that if I need something oddly specific most people wouldn't be able to help anyway (and those who could would have to invest a lot of time in that specific case to understand it).

I've simply stopped asking for help with those. IMO there's some point after which it's counterproductive for both parties.

> I've researched all other solutions and they didn't work,

I ran into this the other day. A person was asking about a Y and when pressed about it that person said the other solutions didn't work. I dug back into that person's history and while they did try a canonical solution - the lacked the ability to debug their efforts.

For context, the Y they wanted to do was essentially to rewrite a core framework in Rails because they didn't understand that an object they were using was nil. Their problem was entirely about how they were getting input from a user form and they wanted to rewrite a framework.

When I pointed it out the person never responded, and I saw a similar question posted by that same person a couple of days later.