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When we (users with enough reputation) protect questions, the standard text talks about "low quality answers", and it's a frequent thing that is done with very old questions which are resurrected to the front page either due to a new answer (like yours in this case) or because the question was linked offsite. These scenarios tend to lead to many low-rep ...

Protection racket Your own list illustrates how pointless this sort of proactive activity is: in most cases, few or no new answers were posted regardless of whether the questions were protected. Indeed, the most-answered question of the lot was immediately protected. It's not the raw traffic that creates the problem. It's traffic coupled with a question ...

This is by design: Users with 10 or more reputation can answer a protected question. However, the +100 account association bonus is ignored for this check, so you must have earned 10 or more reputation on that specific site to answer a protected question Related Auto-protect questions that get more than N answers from new users in a 24-hour period The ...

What happened is that two of the people answering got fairly quick upvotes on their answers. Enough to go over the 10 rep requirements. At that point, when a new answer comes in, those are excluded. This is working as designed - may need tweaking though.

There are two deleted answers on the question. The later one is complete nonsense, and I'm guessing is what triggered the protection. That said, I do agree with you the protection here was a bit premature. Protecting a question goes against our promise that asking and answering is completely free and requires no rep. It's a last resort tool for questions ...

I think it may have to do with the protection/unprotection by a diamond the first day; see the revision history. This may have blocked the auto protection from kicking in.