Well, SO does have a way of dealing with it through the use of bounties. As far as I'm aware, it requires the person asking the question to give up some rep though. Maybe there should be some internal bounty on all unanswered questions after a period of time.
Most questions that don't get answered are just poorly phrased questions that either don't get enough attention or aren't really answerable. These eventually get deleted. I like the current bounty system because any user with enough reputation can put a bounty on any other user's question. That means a human has to look at it and deem it worthy of a bounty, which I think is better than automatically bumping questions based on age.
