Here's a nice idea, that I heard from 
@steemsmart. In where the developers should add couloured tokens to review you as a writer.
In essence steemit could become the great personality test in where you could vote people based on how funny, creative or smart they are.
You can listen to the podcast here. They mention it briefly at the start. The idea itself needs some cooking before it could be released, so we're only left with hopes of it ever getting released.
Think of upvotes as your personal rating to how good of a writer/blogger you are.
Colored upvotes could be used to filter the content even further. Currently people are still trying to react to the reputation update, but when in reality it's currently as useless as the follow button was before the feed arrived. Reputation could eventually end up as your total level. It's a sum of all the different colored reputations. I'd imagine that You'd possibly review your reputation even more than people would review their wallets.
Reputation should not be misunderstood as trust. Reputation should include trust.
In a world where everyone would be using steemit, people would use steemit like craigslist is used today. Since you shouldn't let people send trust via upvotes, trust could be implemented via the active part of the steemit network. For example, you can add trust to a transaction that has already happened. That trust would be included in your reputation.
The introduction of the reputation system adds a whole new area of possibilities to include to steemit.
Meanwhile everyone wants the developers to release a perfectly functioning and scalable version of the site tomorrow, with all the functions that make this site complete, but that's just not possible. We can all pitch new ideas and discuss them, but as long as we're not the ones contributing the code we're measured by the amount of stake we in the system. Be it reputation wise or monetary wise. Soon I'm guessing the reputation will overtake the monetary part for sure.
I however am not a developer and am just exploring the potential that could be achieved with this platform, since it appears that it's still in it's infancy. This means people should not take my texts as facts, but as a highly speculative writing.