I had the same impression, which is some of what drove me away from it. I'm okay with meritocracies, which StackExchange seems closer to, and is especially the case with e.g. math forums, but Quora seemed to be much more class-based, where there were lots of people without any particularly strong skills who were part of the "elite" community due to wealth/lineage or something.

More problematic, though, was that there was increasingly a lot of "soft spam", answers that were more somebody promoting their tangentially related startup or book than actual answers. I'm not even against relevant self-promotion, but it feels like it's more of a problem at Quora than here; HNers tend to stick to more relevant self-promotion, and there's stricter community policing on popping into a thread with a pile of buzzwords and a link to your webinar that's sort of vaguely related to the thread's topic.