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Yup, I get what you're saying, and I appreciate your points.
I would answer them one-by-one, but I'm not
that invested in this idea (other than believing that it's a technically sound countermeasure for theymos' concerns). So, I'll address your main points (as I see them):
I don't believe that the administrative effort would be that significant. With the existing merit system, theymos seems to have taken a very hands-off approach, and it's working out pretty well, in my opinion. With the rMerit system, theymos might have to be a little more prescriptive, and write some rough guidelines for the mods to follow, but this would be (mostly) a once-off effort.
I don't believe this would be that complicated to implement. I can appreciate how my complexity estimate would seem to have little value, but I did recently
finish a 2FA patch for the forum, and I can tell you without hesitation that a basic implementation of reporter badges based on rMerit would be easy by comparison.
I get what you're saying about duplicated work and Epochtalk making it difficult to justify effort being spent on SMF, but on the other hand, I think there's an opportunity to test and refine this idea on SMF before deciding whether it's worth adding to Epochtalk.
One last thought, which I didn't make clear in my original proposal: I'm not suggesting making "rMerit" a thing that shows up on your profile page, or above your avatar. It's not meant to be on an equal footing with proper merit, it's just an implementation detail. The only people that should be worried about how it works, what it means, and where it's displayed are the people who are shooting for reporter badges. If it were implemented tomorrow, most people wouldn't even notice (there are almost no user-facing changes, besides the badges themselves). The way I see it working (at least, initially) is that when you go to report a post, you might see something like this:
Seeing
[rMerit: ...] would be enough of a clue for interested people to search the forum for "rMerit" and find the topic(s) describing rMerit ranks/badges and how much rMerit can be expected (typically) for different kinds of reports. Actually, as I'm explaining this, I'm realizing that calling it "rMerit" was probably a mistake and something like "rPoints" might sit better with people and lead to less confusion. Anyway, my point is that this doesn't have to be a "big" oh-my-god-this-changes-everything feature; it can be implemented in a very low-key way that only really affects the mods (and, of course, slowly affects the histogram of moderation reports, which is its whole purpose).
One last-last thought, for the people that haven't been following the discussion: An important reason that this proposal would fare better (than the current system) against potential abuse problems, is that it separates the "action" taken in response to a report from the "reward" given in response to a report. Aside from underpinning moderation reports with an adjustable incentive structure, it opens up a class of reports that could still be marked as "good" and be acted on by the mods, but that would result in no reward (0 rMerit). Presumably, most people wouldn't bother with those types of reports. Deciding what kinds of reports should go in this class (e.g. really old posts with minor rule violations) would allow theymos to stop people from trying to "grind" these badges with low-effort strategies.