pops117: You seem most eager to stick to the system? Why's that?
As I've said earlier, rep system was meant to be a way to promote users who solve problems in the question / problem topics. Sure, votes on the posts were affecting it as well, but the ratios were like 80-90% for solving problems vs 10-20% for being active on the forums and posting interesting / funny / helpful stuff. We had a cap on the number of rep any user could get from the "votes" so creating fake accounts for voting purposes had zero effect. That's how it was in 2009 and 2010 and for most part it worked great.
Now, the completely different thing is that due to a stupid bug (and a group of users that decided to exploit it for various reasons, mostly fun ;) the system completely lost it's meaning now and I totally agree that right now it just doesn't work... But that does not mean in can't be fixed.
Of course there is and will be a group of people that just can't stand any rep / points / stars / magic mushroom awards ;), no matter how does the system behind it work, although judging from the feedback we got in the past 2 years there are very very few requests like that. Maybe we should add an option to manually hide the rep number via settings menu for users who don't like it... I'm pretty sure we will discuss it in the near future, but first we need to handle the spam problem :).