@kendrahill, I'm just getting into this conversation and it's a great one. Here are a few of my responses for this comment - I'll keep posting more too as I progress through this conversation ;)

Your idea for "moderators" is actually quite a good idea. Steemit, Inc is already working on a similar idea that's related to the "Communities" update. Instead of moderators, Steemit, Inc is calling these people "Oracles".

These Oracles (to my understanding) will be in charge of "validating" peoples' accounts within certain communities. If the community so chooses, they will have their own SMT with it's own rewards pool and set rewards. Their token will be distributed how they see fit and one of those parameters can be for only validated accounts.

The oracle process itself is rather complex. From what I understand, it's built in a relatively unbias way.

About what you said where people are not allowed to upvote their own blog posts - that's actually not true, you can hit the upvote button on any of your own blog posts as you see fit.

For Reputation - I think there's a lot that can be done with rep scores. I used to look at rep scores as an indication of somebody's "age" on Steemit. Now I mostly ignore them.

I think that the communities update will also bring a new type of "rep score" system within certain specific communities who choose to create such a system. We'll just have to wait and see though!!

Great stuff here!