This has been my experience as well. Actually, it's worse. I actually managed to earn a bunch of points on SO by finding some questions that needed better quest

This has been my experience as well. Actually, it's worse. I actually managed to earn a bunch of points on SO by finding some questions that needed better questions...but it took a long time to get there for all the usual reasons of not wanting to jump through those hoops or spend lots of time trolling the site. Then I did something really stupid: I had an outstanding unanswered question about a really obscure subject, and I thought well, is someone answers this they deserve a bounty, so I added one. I didn't really care about rep, and my question was hard, so I put most of my points into it. It didn't occur to me that spending most of my rep would cause my account to degrade back into noob mode; I was thinking I had earned the privelegs of a normal user and they were mine to keep. Worst of all, my question went unanswered, and the bounty was just claimed by the system. I haven't earned back enough reputation to be a normal user again, although I have stumbled across many SO questions/answers that could use my insight. Since I can't use the site correctly, I just leave.