[Ryan Beal]

Yeah that was my initial reaction too. But check out how many options they give for modifying the system:

Register Date Factor
The number of reputation points that a user is able to give or take is dependant on several factors, with the length they have been registered as one of them. A user's power is first initialized at 1 and then this factor and the factors that follow are used to increase it. For example if you set this to 365, every 365 days that the user has been a member of your forum, they would gain one point. So if they have been a member for five years, they would gain 5 points of power for a total of 6.

Post Count Factor
The amount of posts that a user has can also affect their reputation power. Set this to number of posts that you want to award one point for. For example, set this to 50 and for a user with 500 posts, they would gain 10 points of power.

Reputation Point Factor
The users current reputation score can also affect their reputation power. Set this to 100 and a user with a reputation of 1000 would gain 10 points of reputation power. If you set any of the power factors to 0, that will effectively remove that factor from having an effect on the user's reputation power.

Minimum Post Count
If the reputation system is enabled, anyone will be able to rate a post but only users with a post count above the level you set here will be able to actually give points or take points from another user.

Minimum Reputation Count
As with the post count above, a user must have a reputation above this level to be able to give or take points from another user's score.

Daily Reputation Clicks Limit
This sets how many unique members that a forum user will be able to rate in any 24 hour period. Administrators can rate as many people as they wish.

Reputation User Spread
This setting dictates how many unique members that a user must rate before they are able to rate the same member twice. The goal of this setting is to stop a member from either artificially bumping or dropping a user by repeatedly rating their posts.

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When rep is enabled you don't rate a poster by saying he's a 2 out of 10. You rate a particular user by post and it gives you the option to 'approve' or 'disapprove'. The given score is then based on rep power as outlined above.

So it's pretty cool. I just don't know that it would be very popular regardless.