Thinking about it, I actually feel that the rep system needs to be completely revitalised. I don't like the idea of just having rep gems, they're not specific enough, and I don't think people actually care about them anymore. There's so many types of posts, and those doing the posting. I think they both need to be described in more detail - a user with a high amount of rep gems could mean anything.
I would propose scrapping rep gems, and the whole 'thumbs up'/'thumbs down' option for posts, in favour of a system where you get the option to describe each post in more detail. For example, you could have certain options to select on each post, such as 'helpful', 'unhelpful', 'comedic', 'trollish', 'creative', 'well-rationalised' and so on. The option that is most popularly selected on each post, would be how that particular post is branded. For example, a post that has the 'creative' option selected the most, would be branded clearly on the thread as 'creative'. This would then feed into the badge system that's recently been implemented, and you would get a badge every time you reach a certain amount of posts that have been branded in a particular way.
I don't know if this has been suggested before, but I think it's a pretty good idea.