This indicates a central tendency and predominance of Saints that locked eyes on their future spouse over spilled punch cards...

That sounds very romantic, I've never watched the show but maybe it would have made a great episode of How I Met Your Mother. :-)

Seriously though, what you are describing did sort of irk me when I started using this site more heavily. If I recall my exact thoughts on the topic were, "I swear some Monks could just post a reply that says '*cough*' or '*sneeze*' and get more upvotes than a less known/newer Monk who posts a well thought out and helpful reply." And yes that is an invitation for some of the senior Monks to reply to this with "*cough*" or "*sneeze*", I always prefer humor than a lack of it.

I got over it pretty quick based on the fact that a lot of those monks have contributed so much, not even just in terms of helpful nodes, but in terms of being janitors, pmdevs, etc., that they deserve 10 times the fake internet points than they already get anyway. There are times where I think a node (Monk) deserves several upvotes, so I'll pretty much upvote anything they say (within reason and good conduct) in the thread to compensate for the limitation of one per node.

As far as attracting new members, I'm not sure how much the XP game plays in to that, I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that it's a primary or even determining factor for most users... and that's coming from a self professed XP Whore and younger youngish late arriving Monk. :-)