That's very possible.
It seems unlikely that both of these are true: (1) Having a karma system is a good thing for LW. (2) Issues related to the karma system, even ones that crop up repeatedly and produce a great deal of discussion and (it appears) strong feelings, should be treated as middle-school-level status games.
Can you expand on your reasons for considering that conjunction unlikely?
I understand what you're trying to imply here, but arriving there seems to depend on a lot of unstated assumptions (e.g., assumptions about what the admins' goals are, about the heterogeneity of the LW community and the collective goals/attributes of various subsets of it, about what the alternatives are to some people treating karma as a middle-school-level status game, etc.) that it might be valuable to articulate (and think through) with more precision.
I'm just tired of the signal pollution, and would like to be able to use karma to honestly appraise the worth of my articles and posts, without seeing 80% of my downvotes come in chunks that correspond precisely to how many posts I've made since the last massive downvote spree.
EDIT to add data points:
Spurious downvoting stopped soon after I named a particular individual (not ALL downvoting stopped, but the downvotes I got all seemed on-the-level.)
One block of potentially spurious downvoting occurred approximately one week ago, but then karma patterns returned to expected levels. I consider this block dubious, because it reasonably matches what I'd expect to see if someone noticed several of my posts together and disagreed with all of them, and did not match the usual pattern of starting with the earliest or latest post that I had made and downvoting everything (it downvoted all posts in a few threads, but not in other threads), so I'm just adding for completeness.
Spurious, indiscriminate downvoting started up again approximately half an hour ago on Sunday (12/1/2013), around noon MDT.
Edit: And now on Tuesday, 12/3/2013, at 10 AM, I'm watching my karma go down again... about 30 points so far.
Edit: And now on Saturday, 12/14/2013, at 2 PM, I'm watching my karma go down again... about 15 points so far, at a rate of about 1-2 points per second.