There is definately precedence for this. I'm not sure if it requires godlyor just janitorial intervention but it certainly has happened in the past and will happen again in the future. Probably the relevent docs should be enhanced to state this explicitly.

Having said that I'm wondering if maybe a rule like "nodes in a thread that has been frontpaged that are by the frontpager may not be voted on" would be a good idea. I know the FP system can be gamed as it is, and even such measures aren't immune, but perhaps it would at least emphasize that doing so is outright ethically wrong, and would increase the perception that the system tries to be fair.

Again there is precedence here, as at one point you could FP or approve your own nodes. We stopped that after it became obvious that it was being used to inflate XP.

Also, if we ever get to a point where we seriously start looking at changing the system my first priority would be to vastly reduce the number of votes in the system. This will probably be perceived as unfair by newer monks who will probably take a lot longer to get to the higher levels, but IMO this will reduce a lot of the XP/Rep related issues. With the way the votes are doled out and the number of saints we have now (who are consistantly the most prevalent visitors) the number of votes available to be cast on any given day has grown vastly out of proportion to the number of nodes being posted (IMO relatively static). This means that nodes that when I started probably wouldnt garner more than a few rep often get 10 or 20 times that. If votes were more expensive then IMO we would see an improvement in the "quality" of voting.