While I believe rep is useless (our top 10 rep users are the worst users on Hive like SteemCleaners, KingsCrown, SteemSports), I am not convinced KE is the solution. It is probably a better metric than Reputation, but there are many reasons to sell, and once the tokens are in a users wallet they are free to use do what they want with them. I don't think it's a bad idea to use a users stake to decide if users are committed to Hive, it's not always a black and white thing. Many people have their reasons and I wouldn't look down on someone who is struggling in life, but is producing good content in the community.
That being said, reputation is absolutely useless and is only a measure of how many upvotes a user has received.
RE: Hive curation - are things starting to go too far?