"...a reputation system that really works..."

There's the rub. It's difficult to imagine a reputation system that actually works. The current Steem reputation system is demonstrably not it. You can just buy phat votes that will jack your rep on Steem presently.

Think about how rep works in the real world. There are folks you admire, and whose opinions you value highly. They have high rep to you, but who knows what their rep is to others? Not you, unless you know those others and discuss that topic, and they actually tell you the truth.

Rep is a highly complex and utterly subjective mechanism in the real world, and that's why it has value. Trying to make something similar has proved difficult on social media, athough UA seems to have done the best of any attempt I am aware of.

The fact is that I do not share your opinion of User X, and I don't want to. If I do value your opinion, I might assign it some ability to indicate how much I'll respect someone else - but only to some degree, and that is going to vary from person to person, on both ends.

How that might impact witness elections is just as variable.

Personally, I reckon the age of representatives is ending. It's time for liquid democracy without representatives; for users that are nodes and do the governing themselves. AI will be more necessary for we noobish plebs to be able to set price feeds, as an example of one such variable, but that's only necessary if we have multiple tokens, which isn't particularly necessary TBQH.

A stripped down code that can run on obsolete boxes with users sharing the data via torrents can eliminate hosting costs, nodes otherwise, and be actually distributed and utterly decentralized, and after seeing Steem, that's what I reckon we need. There's a million ways to share beneficial interest, and a token isn't a necessity. Dapps that add tokens, different types of content, and etc., can supply nodes and bandwidth along with the content,and users can add them to their stack if they want.

I expect an actually functional reputation system will be more difficult than almost any other aspect of a social media platform because of subjectivity, and the difficulty of making that useful.

Thanks!