Suppose a new user posts a question. You know that the answer can be easily answered if they just look it up (for the sake of argument, that's the only problem with the question). So you leave a downvote and a comment about how bad their question is and they should look over at Resource X. Awesome, yes, you're defending against bad questions. Except now that user still doesn't know the answer, and they feel bad.

Yes "shows a lack of research effort" is an explicit reason on the downvote tooltip, however, I propose that we should show good faith, especially with new users. Maybe they did try to look on Resource X, and the information wasn't completely there, or they didn't know exactly what they were looking for. At the very least, the user deserves an answer, without feeling bad for asking a question.

And it's not really hard to work "you can check out this resource for more information on anything else you might ever want to know about this game" into an answer. So I say, why not do that instead of just leaving that resource in a comment?

tl;dr: If you can easily answer a question, then I say, do it.

Suppose a new user posts a question. You know that the answer can be easily answered if they just look it up (for the sake of argument, that's the only problem with the question). So you leave a downvote and a comment about how bad their question is and they should look over at Resource X. Awesome, yes, you're defending against bad questions. Except now that user still doesn't know the answer, and they feel bad.

You've already downvoted their question. And there's a pretty fine line between a helpful comment, and a "-1 because" comment.

It's not really hard to work "you can check out this resource for more information on anything else you might ever want to know about this game" into an answer. So I say, why not do that instead of just leaving that resource in a comment and sending the user on their way to find the answer on their own?

tl;dr: If you can easily answer a question, then I say, do it.