I agree that the danger of sympathy driven votes are big, but that is human nature i catch myself at voting for a particular person which helped me in the past more often than for other persons ... I dont think it is completely false to vote for home nodes since i regularly look for users home nodes that i think write good answers. Or home nodes from users that hang around at the chatterbox, and i have seen many interesting nodes linked from their home nodes that i may have never read otherwise ...