I know you know that best nodes is also sliced on a month and a year.

There's been some discussion in the CB lately about doing things like letting monks over a certain level keep their links unaltered otherwise they might garner a ref="nofollow". I think this would also be a good idea to apply to nodes based on rep (and corresponding meta tags in single-node views). Even if it weren't being used at all, meaningful data is worth collecting. It's true anonymous monk posts don't often land on the best of page. I think they would more often if there were less reticence to "waste" votes on them.