So basiclly, one could be a "saint" without knowing a single bit of Perl (by replying to polls), does this make sense?

Yes, because the XP doesn't represent your perl knowledge at all. If it represents anything it's probably your investment in this community.

Another thing one can wonder about if XP represents how useful your reply was to the OP's question... My answer to that is no... I remember a thread about DBD::Proxy, there were a total of 4 replies, the total reputation was 7, does this mean the replies were bad?

The OP can only cast one vote. The rating of a node represents "the usefulness" of the node to all of the monks. It might not even be a direct answer to the OP.

Ofcourse one could say then don't botter to reply to questions that the general masses aren't intrested in, but then the OP isn't helped at all...

I usually just answer the questions that I find interesting, or that have no (good) answers and I can answer reasonably quickly. My time is limited. XP isn't really a concern.

The way XP is seen is bad...
How is it seen?

There are people with more experience then me, who know less... (ofcourse not everyone).
See my point above. XP has nothing to do with knowledge.

Should you be able to reach the highest level only by asking intresting questions?
Definitely
(questions that others might ask, and which probably are answerd in many FAQ's)
FAQs are not interesting questions. All questions might be asked by others, that's not an indication of interestingness.

Also giving a pointer to the FAQ or the correct POD results in less Experience (or atleast as far as I can see) then given the full answer... but what is the most useful?
Do both for maximum node-rep :-) Pointing to the docs is a good and quick way of answering a question. If you take the time to explain the problem in some more detail, that can be very useful too. See my point about "investment".

And yes, the XP system is flawed, but then, we're dealing with people, so it won't ever be perfect. :-)

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

In reply to Re^2: Zen and the art of ignoring XP by Joost
in thread Zen and the art of ignoring XP by DaWolf

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