This experiment appears to be a dead end. The problem it revealed can't be fixed by quick closes... it can't be fixed by closes at all.
Per my observations, since the experiment started, we've got lively and interesting reopen queue. To me this indicates that solid amount of closed questions are worth improving and reopening.
Thing is though, when I tried to find these questions myself, not through reopen queue, it turned out very difficult. Site is flooded with blatantly off-topic, unsalvageable crap that hides questions deserving a closer look.
- Guess we need to thank SE Quality Project which (finally) made it really difficult for low quality questions to get answers at SO. As a result, askers are now trying their luck at other sites. (I wonder by the way why they put "Stack Exchange" in the name of that project. Only site that benefits of it is Stack Overflow; at Programmers it only brings pain and suffering.)
Salvageable questions being visible only through reopen queue is very bad thing. It means that only very small fraction of site users can participate - 3K users who frequent that queue plus few others who were lucky enough to catch a question before it was buried under heaps of unworthy garbage.
This in turn means very low chance for questions to improve and reopen, and no matter how fast we close, we can't change that - the flood of hopeless stuff simply hides questions worth looking at.
Above makes me think that "Server Fault experiment" may be a better way to go for us. Folks over there recently elected moderators who seem to be quickly closing and most importantly, deleting, questions that are clear cut off-topic. This way we can get more usable site front page where every user can find gray area, incorrectly closed, salvageable questions and take care of these.
(On a historical note, I couldn't even imagine proposing above option two years ago. Back then, site scope wasn't settled firmly enough to allow such measures.)
Meanwhile, an advice to those who want to continue reopening efforts no matter what.
When searching through closed questions, skip most recent ones and proceed to those posted 3-4 days ago. At this age, some of the worst off-topics are cleaned up by delete votes of 20K / 10K users.
You may get even cleaner selection at 10 days old questions which are additionally cleaned by roomba, but since that script is automatic, it may also delete some salvageable questions.
