This is pure hypothetical, but I bet Reddit could derive an internal reputational number that is a combination of both karma (free and potentially farmable) and awards (that people actually pay for or that are scarce and shows what they value) that would be a better signal to noise ratio than just karma alone.
It could work like Google search where link farms have less weight than higher quality pages. Yes, you can still game it yet it will be harder to do so.
