Actually your post does make sense, but I disagree with you on the signal/noise ration issue. I don't think that XP versus posts means much. Because it doesn't say anything about the quality of those posts. Maybe a person just posted enough to get up to a voting level and then voted like mad. Or may be a person posts lots of good commentary but doesn't vote at all. My point (which I am doing a really poor job of making) is that we shouldn't discourage people from posting constructive commentary or creative ideas. And we shouldn't water down the value of XP by insisting that people use all their votes.