When I used 'reputation', I meant actual social reputation, not broken blockchain reputation. As you've stated, many users have a high blockchain reputation but low social reputation, and the opposite can easily occur when people with high blockchain reputation choose to trash those with high social reputation (but not as deep pockets).

The alternative score that is based on follows, which isn't based on votes on posts, if it were to become the main score to replace the existing reputation score, I could see as being one way to reduce the abusability of downvotes hitting reputation.

This I believe was the original intention of Hive account@steem-ua, though their implementation proved that a score based on followers can also be gamed, though not as easily as the blockchain reputation score.