That's ... a lot.  And a lot of extremely diffuse inferred judgments from statistical or imagined others, rather than specific people (including yourself) who will care about it.  

You're absolutely right that the signaling game has enough truth behind it that it's generally best, for most people, to just follow.  You're forgetting that you're not most people, and it's quite possible that structured undergrad education is way harder for you than for most people with your IQ.   Some will judge you for that.  Most won't care. 

On a practical side, it is a hurdle.  I dropped out of college long ago, it slowed my career by a fair bit for the first decade, but stopped mattering at all once I had significant job successes.  However, I've just changed jobs, and even with significant time with Principal and Distinguished Engineer titles, I had to get my prospective new boss to change their req to say "or equivalent experience" on the job description or HR wouldn't let me interview.  And my background check took extra time because they had trouble verifying my HIGH SCHOOL transcript. 

So, I can't answer for you.  The costs (in terms of emotional work) are likely higher than you say, but you may be enough of a different person that they're not all that high. The benefits are real, but most of them are intangible, and far more about how you think of yourself than how others see you. 

I agree with your assertion that pure factual questions are cheaper and easier than (correct) answers.  I fully disagree with the premise that they're currently "too cheap".

I see many situations where questions and answers are treated as symmetric.

I see almost none.  I see MANY situations where both are cheap, but even then answers are more useful and valued.  I see others where finding the right questions is valued, but answering is even more so.  And plenty where the answer isn't available, but the thinking about how to get closer to an answer is valuable.

The examples you give all seem about social power and harassment, not really about questions and answers. They're ABSOLUTELY not about questions and answers being symmetric, they're explicitly about imposing costs on someone who feels obligated to answer.  Fuck that.  The solution is not to prevent the questions, but to remove the obligation to generate an expensive answer.  Anyone's free to ask any question, and most of the time they'll be ignored, if they're not providing some answers of their own. 

So, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank ?

reason for downvote: this doesn't make clear (and is probably wrong about) the tie from game theory descriptions "zero sum" and "nash equilibrium".  I suspect they don't mean what you think they mean, but perhaps you're just focusing on other aspects of the decisions, and where the game theory is less directly important.

In fact, neither bike protections nor crime is fixed-sum.  If everyone buys locks, thieves go to a bit more effort to defeat the locks, and there's probably LESS theft, but not zero.  The Nash equilibrium for effort-to-secure vs effort-to-steal will depend entirely on payoffs, and there's no reason to believe it's legible enough to find (or that it even contains) a zero-crime option.

I think this depends a whole lot on the domain/product, the scalability vs locality question (cookies get worse if more are made in the same place and then distributed, most software doesn't), and the network effect (software that depends on many people using the same thing).

I love my Kindle (and have since the ugly angular V1).  It would be very hard to argue that Amazon is particularly good at "one thing well", though.  Almost none of it's other products are that focused, and it's only because serious readers spend so much on books that they've kept the Kindle fairly pure.  

More generally, focusing on a single thing is HARD.  You need to find a thing that people are willing to pay for (either a few paying a lot or a lot paying a bit), and that you can make more cheaply and better than your competitors.  For most enterpreneurs, the path to that is to do a lot of things, then cut the ones which aren't that successful.  This is a SEARCH strategy, not a long-term octopus vision.  They're trying to find the one (or few very related) things that they can do well (and do well for themselves).   Many of them don't actually find it, so they either just get used to "do lots of stuff pretty badly", or give up.   

In theory, competition should counteract a lot of those incentives. Since software generally has low marginal costs, the ones with better functionality for passing users should get more market share, and investing in becoming/staying best will be rewarded.

For a lot of it, noise and short-term metrics overwhelm the quality drive, unfortunately. That’s likely because most software is too cheap (because many customers prefer inexpensive crap, so good things don’t get made).

[ I don't consider myself EA, nor a member of the EA community, though I'm largely compatible in my preferences ]

I'm not sure it matters what the majority thinks, only what marginal employees (those who can choose whether or not to work at OpenAI) think.  And what you think, if you are considering whether to apply, or whether to use their products and give them money/status.

Personally, I just took a job in a related company (working on applications, rather than core modeling), and I have zero concerns that I'm doing the wrong thing.

[ in response to request to elaborate: I'm not going to at this time.  It's not secret, nor is my identity generally, but I do prefer not to make it too easy for 'bots or searchers to tie my online and real-world lives together. ]

Most of these kinds of posts should start with Woody Allen's 1979 quote:

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Agreed, but it's not just software.  It's every complex system, anything which requires detailed coordination of more than a few dozen humans and has efficiency pressure put upon it.  Software is the clearest example, because there's so much of it and it feels like it should be easy.