I personally think that the matter is very easily confused and skewed because XP and voting both mean something and nothing at the same time. No, I'm not going to take a Zen or quantum mechanics approach to this (for now, anyway :)), but rather something far more down to earth for once.

Before I continue, I'd just like to state that this is my personal interpretation and opinion. Treat it as you would treat anyone's opinion.

First, the already stated "doesn't mean anything" point: everyone knows that they vote for different reasons. Different people who vote for the same reasons have different levels of "conservatism" insomuch as one will decide that a node is voteworthy whereas another will not. Being that I -- someone quite ignorant in the ways of Perl -- am where I am on the XP scale (and steadily increasing), I would venture to say that either more people are liberal about their upvoting -- or there are a lot of people who are "whoring for XP" to use the vernacular. All of these issues combine into making the XP system meaningless from the perspective of an objective analysis of node quality and relevance.

On the other hand, most people (I hope?) are more conservative with their votes and only spend them where they really believe they should go. I tend to fall into this conservative pattern, though the above point about "what one person considers is voteworthy isn't the same as what another person thinks is voteworthy" still applies. And as has been stated in earlier posts, most people do prefer to see their nodes upvoted rather than downvoted. So it has meaning to those people, and even more so to the aforementioned "XP whores". It is these factors which impart meaning and value to the XP system, even if it is ephemeral and temporary. It is also obviously meaningful to a number of people as evidenced by the number of posts on the subject -- such as this very thread and all of its replies.

So, I guess what I'm really saying is -- like everything else that exists, the XP system is neither meaningless nor fully meaningful (not the best term for what I want to say, but the parallelism helps to express the point, I think). To some undeterminable degree it's an expression of the community's collective opinion of a node as expressed over the period of that node's lifetime. It's a social thing, and social things are wont to change rapidly and without warning. What's chic today may be socially reprehensible ten years from now. But to another degree, it's an expression of how a certain group of people (the aforementioned "XP whores") want to raise in the PM ranks for reasons unknown. Hopefully that group shrinks every day. But, like most social things (XP and voting included), it's unpredictable and uncontrollable. They're social phenomena, and worth inspection (at least in my opinion, and the opinions of those who start / reply to threads like this one). I don't really think that there are any permanent points that can be derived from such inspection, except that there are no permanent points. :)