While the principles behind your ideas don't bother me, these two points have some specific implementation issues.
skeletonbow: I say either completely do away with the rep system entirely, or at least remove the rep score from being visible to users of the forum or via any APIs that are available. We simply do not need to know what someone else's rep score is.
As long as rep is tied to things like being able to post links, then end users need to know. Otherwise you have complete newbies showing up going "why can't I post links", and people who know have to say something like "you've got an invisible rep score that is influenced by x, y, and z. When it is high enough you can post links, but there is no way to check its current value. Also, don't piss anyone off or you might suffer serial downreps, thereby hosing up your linking ability".
There is disentanglement that needs to occur before hiding/discarding rep entirely. That also means inventing replacement systems to deal with some of the issues that we've got (like when someone can start posting links). And talking about it here made me realize we probably won't see rep go awhile for a good while.
skeletonbow: In addition to that, the "rate up/down" should be replaced with a mechanism to flag posts and indicate why they are being flagged clearly, as well as giving someone the opportunity to remove a flag they have set such as if they accidentally clicked on it. I accidentally marked a post as spam yesterday without having any way to say "oops, I didn't mean to do that" for example.
For this method to have any meaning, GOG would have to have staff available to check on these flags. Thinking about the implications of this statement will be left as an exercise for the reader.
Edit: I do like the idea of having a neutral button. Currently, the only recourse to a misclick is clicking the other button, and I'm not entirely sure what that ends up doing on the back end.