"... allowing them to judge better the 'value' of their nodes and others."

There are so many differing reasons monks upvote or downvote nodes that it may be naive of a member to put too much faith in whether his node, or others, were 'valuable' based on votes.

The node tension discussion mentioned above is interesting and would be another bit of node data that I'd find intriguing as an additional piece of info (leaving the current net votes showing as well), but it still couldn't be a realistic guide to a node's value. If it was, we'd probably already have a Super Search feature letting us search for "Nodes with >= X Reputation"...