Sure.

But it's not unreasonable for me to treat the beliefs of people who actually pay attention to what I do as a different set from the beliefs of people who don't, and to devote different levels of effort to attempting to manipulate the former and the latter.

For example, I might decide that the beliefs of people who won't pay attention to what I actually do before deciding that I'm behaving badly simply aren't worth considering at all.

This might not be wise -- that is, I might not like the consequences of that decision -- but it's perfectly coherent, and entirely on-topic.

I doesn't matter what you do, what matters is what newbies and outsiders think who are not aware of your superior and rational use of the reputation system.

Your tone doesn't fit well.

This post is about public relations so you have to take an outside view.

In my observation this is about you venting your same old issues yet again.

That would undermine whatever value the whole karma system may have at this point. Not punishing, or perhaps even rewarding mediocre posts seems likely to encourage complacency on behalf of the users.

A race to the bottom would likely ensue as well, since new negative achievements would become possible: who can get away with the most trolling? Who can get the most karma with the least effort?

In fact, I think the system, and most people, are far too lenient already, on the whole.

I wonder if posts shouldn't start out with a slight negative value from the outset, to reflect their high potential for introducing arbitrary complexity (noise) into the established information pool (mostly signal... though that may be up for debate) of the site.

Another idea: the more posts a user makes, the greater that initial negative value should be, to reflect the higher standard that is expected of them as time goes by. :-)

Yeah, that would require pretty complex algorithms.