What steps can be taken to ensure questions stand out and encourage active discussion?
There's not much you can do to ensure questions stand out, besides asking questions about popular games. The more popular something is, the more attention people will pay to it. Unfortunately, that means questions about obscure topics will very quickly fade away, probably with just views, no votes or answers. Of course, if a question is well written, that can help, but someone won't know that before clicking, and will be more likely to click on the question with a popular tag than a question about something few people know about.
You could vote, of course, but the vast majority of questions don't get much votes, and the ones that do have a much lower vote count than view count. Unfortunately, this isn't really something we can fix, unless we provide some incentive for voting (which is its own topic entirely).
There's not really any kind of community engagement besides asking and answering questions. Comments aren't meant for conversation, they're meant to ask for clarification on OP's part.
And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. SE sites aren't meant to provoke conversations. They exist so that users can get helpful, high-quality answers to helpful, high-quality questions. That's what sets us apart. If you want to have a conversation with someone, you'd be better off going to Reddit or similar. Harsh, maybe, but true.
Are there techniques for improving the quality of answers and fostering long-term engagement with such posts?
Anyone can edit questions and answers (though if you don't have enough reputation, your edit will be reviewed). This keeps posts high quality, and also means that people don't have to keep coming back to keep their posts looking nice. If posts aren't helpful, they can be flagged or closed, in which case more high-rep users will come along. And again, there's not meant to be engagement besides voting and posting answers/questions.
If you do want to interact with the community, however, we have places for that. We have The Bridge (our main chatroom), a Steam Commmunity (dead, unfortunately), and a Discord (very slightly less dead).
