The debate over rep rages on, and so it shall for evermore. Now I love each and every rep point; they are all pats on the back. (Yay, I informed someone or made them laugh, or cheered them up.) I even liked my last negrep (though I don't particularly want any more to keep it company.) But I don't worry too much about the total; I think there is a difference between what people think of one's individual posts and what they think of the person. (Why do bad posts come from good people, or vice versa?) As Dash said, some people produce a ton of good posts and clearly deserve rep but none of their individual posts is outstanding all by itself, so they wind up under-repped. A typical case might be where someone is in trouble and a member talks them through it. Andn again, some people do great and wonderful things for the forum which aren't attached to a post; sometimes ya gotta just say "here's a rep for x; I attached the rep and the comment to random post y."
If you have an opinion about rep, you have to ask yourself what a rep-total MEANS. Is it a measure of Popularity? Accomplishments? Thanks? Respect? Rank? Does it reflect the quality of the poster or their posts? (I think it does/means all those things.) Only when this is figured out we can debate whether it divides us or unites us; whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. Only when we know what rep is supposed to mean can we say what we want it to do; only when we know what it is supposed to do can it be rejigged to achieve that. I am all for debate. But I think we can only debate value judgements when the values have been determined. I hope this makes it easier for Moo to judge whether the rep system is working as it should.
While I am on this kind of thing, I repeat that without something to compare to, one's crinkles total is meaningless. Sure, whenever I am active, my total goes up. But postcount is also a record of activity, as is sign-up date. For it to mean anything I need a standard to compare it to. There are reasons for not being able to see others' crinklecount. So there should be a chart somewhere to indicate what it means to be at a given level. Since it measures activity, though, obviously heavy posters/bloggers/wikiers will come out ahead. I think for crinkles to mean anything, a sensible measure would be crinkles/post, or even better, crinkles/day. Even then I don't think it would mean too much, and would just as soon see crinkles disappear. Encouraging activity is all very well but I think the crinkles system discriminates against low-count, high-quality posters. And there is a section of the community that thinks any stats are divisive anyway. Time to put a poll in the field.