Not bumping through edits would prevent sediment churn, which means old (and possibly wrong) information would be left to fester and die in the bowels of the system -- unseen and unloved. That's much more toxic to our community than someone sacrificing a few reputation points.
Our CW threshold is quite generous; I suggest adapting your workflow to do smaller, larger edits instead.
Remember: getting good information out into the world, and getting answers, are the real goal, not arbitrary points -- so we have to favor processes that further that goal.
Also, being a hybrid system, we have aspects of wiki (information-first) and traditional bulletin board / blog (owner-first), but there's always a tension in balancing those aspects of the system.