I'm fairly new to MacRumors and I just came perusing this suggestions forum to see if I could find out why there is even a post rating system in the first place. It's not tied into the vBulletin default rating/reputation system and it doesn't go towards any sort of "overall" rating for users. In the few weeks I've been here I still haven't managed to figure out what the point of the rating system is. It serves absolutely no beneficial purpose whatsoever, at least I haven't found so far.
Except the fact of the matter is that a lot of the time, the higher-rated posts aren't necessarily the most helpful/important/relevant. Instead they're merely "popular." If somebody asks a stupid question, all the smart-ass answers are going to have the highest ratings, which isn't helpful in the scenario you provided.
I think what would solve everybody's problem is to give us an option to hide the ratings... i.e., we can go into our User CP and toggle "I don't want to see post ratings" and voila – It's like it isn't there to us, while everybody else who finds a purpose for them can keep them.