Being a reputation system for a torrent system is much simpler than building a generalized one. This is because the nature of the reputation is very narrowly scoped and it can be computed directly from the basic data of the system.

That's not really possible with the voting data generated by Hive. The current reputation system on Hive was created as a quick stop-gap measure for spam/etc and I believe the Steemit devs who developed it involved fully understood it's weaknesses. I think the idea was that it was better than having nothing at all.

A truly comprehensive reputation/rating system of the sort I'm interested in creating goes far beyond anything that exists today. It's going to take a lot of work to build it, and it's going to take a lot of refinement even once the basic system is built. I've written some posts in the past that discuss some of the challenges involved:
@blocktrades/a-peer-to-peer-network-for-sharing-and-rating-information
@blocktrades/modeling-information-in-an-information-rating-system