That's a good point, but I was actually thinking of a general rep/answer average. When I originally suggested this, I don't think any per-tag metrics had even been established yet. I'd like to think that for this situation, a good answer would still get upvoted alot, so if there's a per-tag breakdown the average should show up higher than an average-of-averages. It's funny you should mention removing the display of rep - I also suggested as a direct result of the amount of dislike from this question. Search for "Hide the rep and badge count" (or just go to my profile page)

@Paulo - I cover a situation like yours - see under "Edit 2" in my question. Basically, if you are participating in niche tags, then you already have a low rep compared to popular tags, so a low rep average shouldn't mean anything to you. The desire to provide good answers should be greater than the desire to game a high average.

One could also argue that you should raise the daily limit, and/or find a balance between when too much time per day on SO is unhealthy. Again, having a rep average is helping the community by providing a way of moderating burnout and curbing overindulgence.

Another way to look at a capped user is that people then start to understand what a "high" rep average should be, and someone with a much higher average is probably artificially inflated. So your argument actually supports my suggestion, because IT SHOWS THAT REP AVERAGE IS SELF CORRECTING. (All caps because I did not think of that without your prompt, thank you) :)

@DVK well, a year later I come back to this one, I've added a pretty big edit. A rep-per-answer-pre-daily-cap would be complex only because there's so much history to backfill. If the suggestion is turned down because of that, at least agree it's a good idea first - let's see if I'm persuasive or not :)

I don't follow baseball, so one coworker tried to explain it to me. "The great thing about the game is all the statistics". I replied "So, a baseball game is just a slow accumulation of stats?" :)

@devinb - I think it's agreed that rep gaming can produce bad answers, which is undesired. But rep avg gaming? Does that produce bad answers? I've edited my question to address these.

In your case, a low rep avg would correlate with a low rep, both relative to the number of answers you've provided. There is no real loss for you. You just brush it off as "I'm a specialist in a niche area". You still provide your quality answers, right? My suggestion is intended to mitigate the motivations behind crap answers.

@David - I don't understand your position on this rep avg suggestion - I'd think that your type of behavior would give you a rep avg to be proud of. If you really are as you describe yourself, I'd imagine your rep avg would be higher than the majority of junk answerers with high rep that I see on SE sites. I didn't suggest (nor do I want) that all your answers should have an equal amount of upvotes or rep.

@GeneralBecos - Unfortunately, after reading about your idea I became one of those who disliked it. My suggestion with this rep batting average is to reduce the importance of the user's rep; your idea of weighing votes with it will give the rep metric even more power.

I also want to point out that having the name, rep score and badges are a vital part of the "ego-boo" economy (to paraphrase esr) and thus could be argued that having those bits there are a required necessity in order to make the site successful in the first place. In this light, I'm actually in favor of keeping those things there.

Thank you Adam - I mostly agree. However, I believe you missed a subtle point from my question above - you are conflating real-world reputation with the SO rep score. As I alluded to in the question, there is a contradiction inherent in the different worldviews of what a rep score means, and how that influences a user's perception of the quality of the answer. Because of this, my argument is that things like the # of badges or the score of the answerer can be detrimental to the site's explicitly stated goal of providing good answers to questions.