[Terr_]

Right, that also interacts with the game-ification, distorting people's incentives for answering questions.

If the site's goal is to have one problem solved forever with one top answer, then whoever manages to secure that top answer wins [0] a kind of dedicated reputational income stream, indefinitely.

Basically, I think it rewards fast answers over good answers, and rewards easy popular questions over hard specific ones. I wonder what would happen if there was a hard limit on how much reputation you could get from a particular question or answer.

[0] Unless another powerful user changes it into a "community wiki" answer, which may or may not be fair to do.

[Veedrac]

On the contrary, my longer, in-depth answers tend to score much higher (>10x) than my less in-depth answers; compare

    https://stackoverflow.com/users/1763356/veedrac?tab=answers&sort=votes&page=1
    https://stackoverflow.com/users/1763356/veedrac?tab=answers&sort=votes&page=16

All a reputation cap per answer would do for me is discourage writing good answers.