TL;DR
If we don't have many experts [professionals] yet - is this a problem?
I don't know whether we do or do not have many film industry professionals but I think we have plenty of experts of a different sort and I don't think it's a problem that we lack the professionals you mention.
Intro
Because Napoleon Wilson, one of our mods, mentioned this topic in relation to a question I answered, I thought I might address it, tardy though it may be.
As some of you may be aware (if you've read my profile) I actually work in the film industry. I have a degree in film and do contract work for a casting director in Austin, Texas. We do casting for commercials and feature films and a couple of TV shows. I've also produced a few short films but nothing you'd recognize. I don't consider myself a professional in the sense of the Groundhog Day screenwriter mentioned in the question but I do have limited inside knowledge...
That being said, I'm here as a movie enthusiast, not as a professional. My best (or, at least, most extensive) answers may relate to casting/production questions but that's because I like facts more than deep, thought-requiring questions about why a film is the way it is... questions like this make me roll my eyes and wonder... why does it matter... that's just how the author/screenwriter/director decided it should be.
General Production Questions:
People working in the TV or movie business and have insider knowledge about production questions. This could be screenwriters, directors, producers, show runners or people working in technical areas like post production.
Firstly, as discussed here, I honestly don't believe that the casting questions and other production-related questions I've answered really belong here. They're not about a film or a TV show, they're general questions about filmmaking, which isn't the purpose of this site... they're also not about technical camera/equipment/editing questions appropriate for Video.SE, so they slide through because there's not a SE site for filmmakers. [insert shameless plug]
As Napoleon said in his comment:
While we do have some film-techniques questions, I think actual film-making experts are more at home on Video Production anyway, since Movies & TV seems more of a consumer site by nature. I'm not saying I wouldn't like any "experts" around here, but to be honest the experts of this site are not expert movie-makers, but expert movie watchers (however they're defined, though). [emphasis added]
I'll say that I don't have any of the technical knowledge to make visiting Video.SE anything other than a confusing cluster of random letters and numbers is well beyond me... I may be involved in production but I don't do that stuff.
If, as I believe, general production questions aren't on-topic here, there's no reason for a generic film professional (like myself) to be here to offer industry insight for non-existent production questions.
Subjective Questions
There's a great article on the Stack Exchange blog about the growth of SE and the appearance of sites that invite subjective questions but give guidelines for how to ask a quality subjective question and what makes a good answer... and they followed it up with a post on the types of questions not to ask. These two sets of information (without the explanations) are on every SE site in the help section under "What types of questions should I avoid asking?".
Movies & TV is definitely a site destined to attract a ton of these subjective questions and they're some of the most upvoted questions on the site.
These questions are different because there is an answer out there but there's a gateway between the question and the answer that doesn't exist on the more objective SE sites... the one or two (or handful of) creators of the media are the only ones who can legitimately answer many of these "why" questions.
It's amazing that Danny Rubin hopped onto SciFi.SE and answered that question about Groundhog Day but I don't think we can expect every famous writer/director/actor/producer to do that.
Some of them have done so in other places (eg: interviews/articles/blogs/Reddit) and we can quote those as evidence but unless the Wachowskis come here (prove they are who they claim) and give us some inside knowledge, even a renown critic's analysis of a film isn't of much factual use (unless they happened to also interview the Wachowskis and asked a similar question).
So, in that vein:
Film Critics
- Professional movie critics with a special education in that area, giving them knowledge about movie history or analysis that goes beyond the normal knowledge an avid movie enthusiast would obtain.
While I certainly wouldn't kick them out the door, I don't know that having critics here would make a significant difference. Remember, many film critics don't have any particular education in film (most of them hold degrees in journalism or literature, not film)... many are simply film enthusiasts who get paid to state their opinion for major news outlets... and these opinions don't have to be supported with facts... per item 5 on the "Great Subjective Questions" list:
Great subjective questions insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references. Opinion isn’t all bad, so long as it’s backed up with something other than “because I’m an expert”, or “because I said so”, or “just because”. Use your specific experiences to back up your opinions, as above, or point to some research you’ve done on the web or elsewhere that provides evidence to support your claims. We like you. We want to believe you. But like Wikipedia itself, {{citation needed}}. And good subjective questions make this clear from the outset: back it up!
Non-professionals have the same access to the internet that professional critics have, which makes the sources that support their arguments available to everyone so I don't see a professional critic's opinion being worth more than any other person's opinion, provided they can both cite references and make good arguments.
Expert Movie Watchers
In my opinion, we are all expert movie watchers. You don't need a degree or a byline to have an opinion about film, you just have to be able to follow the guidelines for good subjective answers: be thorough, constructive, share personal experience (if applicable), and back your answers up with references. If someone is here who is a consumer of movies and TV shows and wants to actively discuss them within those guidelines, that's all you need to be here and be an "expert".
