Call me stupid, but I read through that and I can't find the reason for declining it. Can you elaborate? And by the way, I agree with your attitude too - it's explained in my question already. However, I want to explicitly point out that most users (especially new ones) do not grok this right away, and I think it's a motivation for rep-whoring which I dislike. I think it's not good for SO that's why I bring it up...

thanks, but that's for one person hiding other people's rep. I'm saying that showing rep/badges in the first place is influencing everyone's participation (causing gaming, rep-whoring, etc) and should be hidden for everybody.

I like this interpretation. However, this then makes me wonder if "reputation" is the wrong term to use. Slashdot, for instance, just calls it karma - it's arbitrary, kinda misunderstood, etc. But "reputation" is a little more well defined - it's like saying "respect" or "status".

how about a "rep-per-answer-pre-daily-cap"? :)

Thanks - but an expert wouldn't spend the majority of their time answering things outside of their field, right? A miss here and there would not affect their rep/answer stat very much. I'm expanding on my thoughts in a separate answer... hold on.

I wonder if your situation is the opposite - with a specialized field like yours, an experienced SO user might conclude your rep is under-inflated. I realized I'm concerned about users who have artificially high reps.

P.S. - after posting this question I saw this question about "hit rate" (at meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2238/…), but that's slightly different - it's asking about a percentage of answers which get accepted.

Actually, I'm not sure if there is a safe mode at all for Opera... Google didn't turn up anything for it and I can't recall ever hearing about it (I've been using it since version 5). Anyway, my cookie settings aren't too exotic (in fact, I don't think I bother messing with them much anymore so they might be the defaults when I installed it) and in light of my further investigation (see question edit) I don't think it's the cookie settings. But thanks!

This does work, which sorta raises more questions - why would automatic redirection cause it to fail? And I tried out Opera on my home system (see edit to question) and it works without turning off automatic redirection. With it turned off, I now have to click through one Opera warning "page", and then two "object moved here"-type pages. Anyway, I can put a button to toggle on/off the automatic redirection up on the Opera toolbar, which isn't quite a perfect workaround but I think I'll survive :) Thanks!