I wonder how many newbies in the whole history of Perl had their "llama" arrive from Amazon and shortly thereafter—in a fever pitch of excitement—managed to create a distribution they thought was the best thing since sliced bread and upload it to CPAN only to have their debut into our wonderful, loving community met by a CPAN rater. After which, naturally, they slowly backed out of the room, closed the door behind them, picked up their (PHP|Ruby|Python|Javascript) book and never coded a line of perl again...

Surely, no one can say but maybe—just maybe—we'd be better off with a system similar to Stack Overflow where a user has to have a certain number of points or special kind of badge (e.g. the Teacher, Ambassador, the "Empathy Lieutenant", the "brian d foy", etc) in order to leave a rating on someone's first distribution.

I dunno. It's worth a thought, because this whole thing just made me cringe...