think how many times we see comments along the line of "I'd upvote this again if I could...."

Precisely. That was certainly a factor in my thinking.

... enacting it would surely skew (against!) the rankings of older-but-still-excellent nodes ...

If site participation were as great or greater than in the olden days, I'd agree with you; but as was recently brought up, participation in the site is waning, and commensurately the number of votes cast. Indeed, part of my reason for thinking it would be nice to dole out more votes to the active members is to mitigate, at least a little bit, the disadvantage that more recent nodes have against older nodes.

a way to allow Level 11 monks (and up) to RECOMMEND at node for "good" labeling...

That's certainly an idea... But it introduces a new mechanic, a second kind of vote, which is the kind of complexity increase I'd like to avoid. On the other hand, QandAEditors can easily see which replies to a question have the highest popular estimation, simply by selecting "Note Ordering: Best First" in User Settings.

If the best nodes list attracts votes to its members surely a public "good" flagging would do likewise or maybe even more so.

Yeah; I don't see that as a problem. Think about how the Categorized Questions and Answers section works now. It highlights "good" posts in just the same way.

Now one thing I want to clarify: These two mechanics — letting people give good nodes more than one upvote, and letting special deputies mark some nodes as "good" — would be independent. The former is mob-sourced approbation, essentially; the latter is elitist control. I envision (and again, I wouldn't expect any mechanical enforcement to be necessary) that the QandAEditors would generally not mark any question as "good" until is has been around a while. That is to say, they wouldn't go through today's/yesterday's new SoPW looking for questions to put their stamp on.