I like the concept, but as others have pointed out the devil is in the details of who gets to vote on the awards. And the problems just snowball from there.

I have always been in favor of a reputation system that is difficult to manipulate. That way the users get to vote on status, and we status-seekers (most FTers, I'm sure) can pander for votes all day if we like.

I have given a fair amount of thought to how to design such a reputation system, but as long as we are running vanilla vbulletin software we are limited to its native functionality in this area. I hope that future versions of vbulletin are sufficiently improved that we can experiment with enabling reputation without precipitating any civil (or uncivil) wars.