Thanks, I wasn't aware of some of those numbers. I still find the question hurdle to be the biggest... I personally just haven't found the time or energy to go

Thanks, I wasn't aware of some of those numbers. I still find the question hurdle to be the biggest... I personally just haven't found the time or energy to go and find questions I can answer, or do research necessary to answer. My gut feeling is that SE's post structure, handling of reputation and permissions is overly complex... feature creep in a way. I am glad to hear that your rep can affect other sites rep. I feel like the fractured approach doesn't work very well and it is good to see some improvements in account handling from the beginning like: - Easier account creation and management(openid feels very arcane and this has smoothed out a lot since the beginning I think) - Logging you back on when you visit (I guess they changed how they did session cookies or something, I get these 'welcome back' messages now) - Cross-site notifications and relationships Maybe if they had gone with centralized SE accounts at the beginning with per-site reputations it would have been simpler. The current method might be because of how SE evolved from the 'original trilogy'.