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.