"It seems to me to be a major contributing factor to the fact that members don't really take the experience system too seriously"

Ummm thats because you arn't suppose to take it too seriously. Realy. Honestly. Yes I was on your side once, I thought wow this site is cool, if only the voting system worked better it would just be realy realy realy cool. Well it turns out that in general the voting system isn't important, it serves mainly as feed back for the actual poster as to how their idea was recieved. This node is a perfect example, rather than reply with yes' or no's you get votes, I would guess the node rep on most your posts in this thread are negative. Not because we dislike you or your idea is bad, simply because we don't like the idea and don't want to see it implemented. I was going to vote on all the nodes in this thread and then count up the votes to show that you would have X replies to this node instead of the Y replies you have, but it was too daunting a task as people continualy vote and post.

Simple fact: Voting and Replying are two seperate ways of providing the OP with feed back. In this case I did both, sometimes I only do one or the other. Would 10 replies saying "I don't like this idea" realy be better than ten - votes?

Finaly, your ideas for throwing posts to the lions to remove there ability to vote would be difficult for a number of reasons. First it would require some major rewriting i'm guessing. Second it would require a consideration + votes + action by a moderator to happen which means it would be slow. Third, there are tons of edge cases you need to define (i.e. votes on the node thats been thrown to the lions, replies to it, the votes already cast, many more.)

Instead of this whole system you could just take the opposite approach and percieve less value in each vote. This has the same effect with no additional work. ;)