This means that the system is suboptimal in that its total value cannot equal its potential value because monks are limited to only benefitting from the knowledge of the reputation of a relatively small percentage of the total nodes.

I think you're working from the assumption that node reputation was designed to be an absolute quantifier of the value of a post. I disagree -- at best, it's only relative, considering the number of people who read a post, the time at which it was posted, the context of the discussion, and the available votes. To say that one node "deserves" more votes than another is a step towards madness.

I've always seen voting as a way for the community as a whole to promote things it values and to discourage things it dislikes.

It sounds like your expectations of the system are completely orthogonal to the system itself. The best I can offer you is to enable the user setting that orders replies by descending reputation. That will give you the relative ordering of nodes beneath a parent. It may not be what you want, but it's how the system works.