You're matching an engineering solution to a social problem. Trying to map a paper's social significance to an abstract number is really hard, and in the proces

You're matching an engineering solution to a social problem. Trying to map a paper's social significance to an abstract number is really hard, and in the process you lose a lot of ability to present papers based on taste. Showing me a paper because "these numbers are high and you tend to like these kinds of numbers" is fundamentally different than "you should see this because it is groundbreaking." On the other hand, if we can create a metric for elegance and another for "brings the reader closer to enlightenment," then I'm all for it.