(of course there could be a option to select)
Quora design philosophy, such as it is, is antithetical to any notion of user options. So you can discount that.
Quora has a follower network. Answers show up in people’s feeds, from writers they like (for whatever reason), divorced from the context of other answers to the same question; and people are usually not strongly enough motivated to open up a tab and see what anyone else had to say. If people like a writer, they will upvote their stuff. If people like a writer because of their personality and style, and aren’t extremely interested in the question itself, they won’t look at other answers and weigh them up.
I mean, *I* do. But I might do it once every 20 or 30 items in my feed. How often do you?
So yes, Quora has cultivated a culture of popular writers, because (despite its embarrassment over it) it does have a social network underlying it. And without the social network, it wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near the level of engagement, or free feedback and tagging, that it does. It’s a price to be paid.
It could make it slightly easier to access alternate answers to the same question, I guess, as some sort of preview in the feed. But then again, how many people would click through to those alternates?