I think my main point was lost or misunderstood. Having search results based on thread/post reputation may assist those that are NEW to PM in finding the answers they are looking for more quickly. Just about everyone who had been a PM member for a while can find the answers or old posts they are looking for one way or anther. People who have never visited this site, and who stumbled across it by searching for an answer to a Perl question etc, would not know the difference between Merlyn and Wassercrats and they wouldn't know without a bit of exploration where to find the best nodes pertaining to their subject of interest.

I do understand what Argel mentioned, and of course no reputation system could actually quantify the value of each thread, however I think that for the most part, the threads that withstand the test of time (multiple responses over weeks) would probably have the most to offer, and would probably have some of the better answers.