All of a sudden my standing in the community has taken a hit, not because I have made an inflammatory statement nor proffered code riddled with syntactical mistakes or common logical errors, but because people disagree with my suggestion.

Your standing in the community shouldn't be affected that much from a single -4 node. Nodes in Perl Monks Discussion are usually voted on according to agreement / disagreement, especially if they propose changes to the perlmonks site. which is sort of useful if you want to assess the amount of support for such a change.