Perhaps you're right about this, but the main point was to give prominent users more power when upvoting and downvoting.
The idea was to make upvotes and downvotes of those on http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders count more than the votes of newbies.
The reason why I suggested that users should be able to decide how much points they want to assign when voting is because, there may be situations when you find a comment interesting, and want to upvote it, but not so insightful that you would give it your maximum amount of points.
