Agreed! The problem I see is that the score does not correlate well with the per...

Agreed! The problem I see is that the score does not correlate well with the perceived quality of the community. I'm researching that for some time now and am in the process of preparing a blog article with data analysis and solution approaches.

Work in progress:

https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring

https://felix.unote.io/hacker-news-scores