Before the rep system was introduced, you got to know well enough whose posts were generally interesting and useful. Even with the somewhat larger membership we have today, that is still the case. There aren’t that many posting interesting, funny, useful or intelligent posts.
That newer members will now either have to trawl old posts and simply gather that information and form their opinions on an on-going basis is no bad thing.
The rep system was a decoy – a misleading falsehood in many cases. I have a couple of multi-star idiots (last time I suffered one of their posts anyway) on ignore and blue-dot ‘rookies’ whose infrequent posts are often eye-openers.
There’s a lot to be said for building merit (of both flavours!) through the genuine transmission of who we really are over the passage of time, rather than some artificial and in some cases quite horribly erroneous indications pasted on through a process quite unrelated to genuine quality.