Some random, unordered reactions/thoughts:

• I'm probably basically just like you when it comes to how I cast my votes, but I'm fine with not seeing reps on replies to my nodes until I vote on them myself.
• The overall magnitude of rep scores depends primarily on whether a thread gets shown on the "front page" (The Monastery Gates), so any tendency to compare scores across threads is definitely meaningless.
• As mentioned previously, the relative rep on a given reply tends to vary with its relative position in the thread -- later and/or deeper replies have fewer votes as a rule, so the rep ranking won't be very informative in many cases.
• To the extent that some replies are really good or really bad, this is often reflected in other replies -- later posters tend to comment on earlier ones, especially regarding errors, but often in terms like "So-and-so above gave you the right answer". In the absence of such comments, earlier replies are either okay or irrelevant, and that's usually obvious from content.
• Even (or especially) for newbies, rep scores should be the last criterion to consider when trying to decide how much attention/credance each reply should deserve. The scores work okay as a reflection of value (esp. for the person getting the points), but they don't work well as a determiner of value -- it's a subtle distinction.