On one hand, this reflects a problem that has already been discussed here. Namely, as the user base grows, nodes very quickly get reputations of 15 or higher just by the sheer number of people voting (compare to just a few weeks ago, when a reputation of 15 was enough to put a node among the Best nodes), which adds XP points to the authors very quickly. There were a few good proposals on how to deal with this, but I don't think vroom has expressed inclination to any of them.

On the other hand, in martial arts (Karate in my case) a black belt only means "master of the basics", at which point you can actually "start learning karate". If we make an analogy into the PerlMonks world, we could say that getting a level of Monk (or even higher) only means you have started to master the basic concepts. From there, you can start developing towards true enlightening and knowledge.

I know. I'm sounding creepy too :-)

--ZZamboni