asking questions outside of field of expertise

No, of course you should be able to ask questions in areas where you are not expert: that is in large part the point of MO, or is supposed to be the point!

There is however usually an implicit feeling (which seems more and more in effect as MO gets older) that people who bring their questions here should have already done some preliminary work on their questions: making sure they make sense first of all, and that it's not something that a quick google or consultation of standard easily available sources or 15 minutes of good old-fashioned thinking for oneself can clear up in a jiffy. My own experience is that process can take at least 30 minutes or an hour, in cases where you are asking outside your field of expertise">expertise. And sometimes significantly longer. Remember what the message says when you hover over the downvote button, "This question does not show any research effort: it is unclear or not useful," and that some users are hard-nosed in interpreting that.

There is no doubt that MO can be rough or intimidating -- just like real life. But we should, generally speaking, honor thoughtful well-posed questions that are (as a rough estimate) past the PhD qualifying exam stage. You should always feel free to bring up concerns that a specific question was unfairly treated here at meta.