In the general case, questions asking for software to accomplish some task are off-topic here (and generally closed as "too broad"): answers are necessarily opinions and suggestions, and not really able to stand up well to objective scrutiny.
However: should we allow for exceptions to this rule for questions asking to identify a specific piece of software? Arqade has a similar exception for permitting game-identification if some kind of artifact is provided with the question?
No, these questions are still fundamentally outside the scope of the site in that game developers are not any more qualified or capable of tracking down this kind of information.
Yes, we should permit these sorts of questions provided that they include some kind of visual artifact (screenshot, animated GIF, et cetera) that can be used as a basis for identification and verification.
This is similar to Arqade's policy concerning game identification, which requires the question to include an artifact meeting certain criteria.
I think ID requests would be a good addition to this site if we do them right.
The usefulness of this depends on the rules these questions need to follow. The purpose of the SE network is to provide good answers to questions and to eliminate the need of searching through dozens of random forums to find what you're looking for.
If we have 50 different questions with the same "Please identify this piece of software for me" title and with a gif in the questions body, then there's no chance they are ever going to pop up in a Google search and they might as well get deleted if they only help for one person.
A great example to follow in my opinion is the movie SE. They have strict rules on identification requests. You need to give the question a descriptive title, you need to write a couple of lines of text in the question's body and you need to provide as much details about the movie, as you can (art style, the date you saw it/got released, etc.). If we do the same, then this feature has a good chance of becoming useful.
There's also the problem of how you describe something, this is why, for instance, Anime SE banned id requests some time ago. Different opinions make it close to impossible to find questions about the software you're looking for.
And last but not least, there's the problem with customization. I've seen examples of IDEs getting customized to look like a different ones, because the programmer liked that style (I remember a conversation on r/programminghorror, that occupied 4 and a half screens, because someone asked the OP what IDE he used and no one could recognize it. It was sublime 3 modified to look like VS with IntelliJ-like recommendations)
