Now making an assumption that this is how the majority of monks vote, I would think the reputation should be a good indication, to someone following a thread, as to which are the "best" replies. The most factual, the ones with the best advice, etc.
This may be true, but the reputation value by itself is not all that useful. It seems to me that reputation is, in a large part, a function of visibility. More visibility on the node generally results in higher reputation. It would be more useful to know how many people have read the node compared to the node's reputation. The problem is, there's really know way of knowing how many people read the node. Looking at the rep relative to other nodes in the thread is close, but still may be misleading. Some nodes are posted much later, for example. Basically, we don't have enough information to draw very useful conclusions from the reputation of a node. This is why many Monks say reputation is not all that useful.
