I totally agree reputation isn't a good factor to filter on. Some users are here for a long time, accumulating reputation from old posts that got a lot of votes. That's totally fair, from a 'how useful was this post' point of view, but doesn't say anything on the moderator capabilities.

Some factors I had like to see:

- Give extra weight to the gold badges related to moderation, like [Marshal][1], [Steward][2], etc. Maybe on SO and other larger sites, make this the minimum required badges before allowed into the nomination, or give them extra weight in the candidate score.
- Give a 'meta score'. Since we don't have rep on meta, it is hard to see how the user's opinion on the community is appreciated by the community. We could show the number of Nice Question or Nice Answer badges, or a total score as if there was rep on meta.


  [1]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/160/marshal
  [2]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/185/steward