User Rewards System Needs a LOT of help

Hi all,

We are in the middle of deploying 5.5.

One of the shortcomings of this product is the reputation and rewards feature.  I realize we could customize to provide some of the things that we need, but I'd much rather Telligent take a serious look at this feature and make an effort to make improvements.  Several competetive products such as Jive, Mzinga, and Lithium have fully baked reputation systems that are a LOT more powerful than 5.5 is, out of the box.  Telligent should do the same.

Current Problems:

1. There is a point system but not a really good way to control display of user points, or a "leaderboard", using the standard widgets.  
2. You can view group members using the "Group Members" widget, but there doesn't seem to be any fine grained administrative control over WHY the top members are the top members.  Is it number of posts?  Is it reputation?  Is it points earned?
3. Turning on the points system in the current iteration is nearly useless.  Earning points that can only be viewed when you hover over a username doesn't allow people to understand who the real power users are within a community or sub-community
4. The reputation "bar" does not put me into context at all as to why that user has earned the reputation that they have.  Clicking into a user profile does not reveal any further information as to how they earned the reputation that they did.

Suggestions for completely revamping the user points system:

1. I like the fine grained controls for assigning point values to all sorts of stuff that is in the administrative interface already.  Good show there.
2. Telligent really needs a "leaderboard" widget.  This would be a contextual widget that could be installed either at the site root, in one of the group pages, or inside of the individual group applications.  The "leaderboard" would display the top 10 (or top whatever) users by the number of points they've earned in that contextual category.  So, at the site root level, the superusers of that community would be at the top of the leaderboard.  In each group area, the superusers of that particular group could be displayed.  In an individual forum, blog, or wiki, a leaderboard that would show the power users in that specific area, again by points earned.
3. NEW FEATURE desparately needed:  Allow us to administratively assign special icons or other benefits to users who achieve certain points earnings.  Optionally, allow users to do things on the site that they aren't allowed to do at lower point levels.  For example, only let a user upload their own avater after they've earned a certain point level.   Needs to be configurable at the administrative level without being too much of a hassle.  Lithium blows doors off of Telligent in this specific area.  Communities are all about designating special privileges or other cool stuff to it's power users, and not allowing us control of this out of the box  is a huge missing feature.

Suggestions for the Reputation system:

1. Scrap the current reputation system entirely.  It's half baked and the logic behind how people earn reputation does not make sense in any use case I can think of.
2. Put a little "award reputation" button right below the username on each posting, wiki, blog article, or other type of content that gets posted.
3. Do not give users the option of rewarding their own posts with reputation
4. As users get more reputation "clicks" from other community members, their reputation bar fills up.
5. Allow administrative control over how quickly someone can build reputation, along with controls for adding new levels of reputation as certain power users reach the highest levels of reputation.

I hope these suggestions are clear enough for everyone.  Please ask for clarification  if you're wondering what the heck I'm talking about in any of these use cases above.