There's a lot to like here. Curation via resteems seems like a really elegant alternative.
The idea an author owns their posts is a big one for me.
I wrote this idea (Authors should be able to set minimum reputation required to comment) back when reputation was the only real metric, but UA score or SP balance would work too.
Even better, would be if an author could manually set the RC cost to comment.
Front ends would leave a little indicator in the comment bar showing how much of your available RC it would take to leave a comment, and it'd keep a whole lot of spam off the chain.
Nice. As long as we have a good group of people thinking about these solutions they will eventually happen.
Without even looking at the open source UA can be gamed like a cheap con. Since my early activity it had been my habit to follow all active witnesses. Now that my 30 choices are fairly stable that practice seemed no longer necessary. The first one unfollowed dropped me 8 places in the UA score. Since then my dive from a 4500-ish placement has probably been drastic. The reason for saying probably is because my delegation has been withdrawn once it was realized what a flaky system it is.
So if you want a gpod UA score simply start following all active witnesses. Study the open sourced algorithm and you are likely to be able to game the UA system even further.
UA doesn't care who you follow. It only cares who follows you.
If that is the case my assumption was wrong. Will dig through their code when time permits. Seems a great coincidence that just as my culling of witnesses began that my ranking started falling off at the same time.