Guys, you are over thinking this system. This isn't Stack Overflow or Quora. It's just a simple system to say thanks to someone who posts something of quality that you agree with. At this point we have no plans to create a public facing system to validate who is more or less knowledgeable.
I'd respectfully disagree here and actually say the opposite - I personally think you're under-thinking it. On pretty much any forum new members especially will look for a means of validating who is more or less knowledgeable, and if a reputation system isn't in place they'll fall back to things like post count to try and work this out (it's only natural really - if you've joined somewhere you want a rough measure of seeing if the person who's giving you advice is trustworthy or not.) So essentially what you'll have by removing a public reputation system is still a reputation system of sorts, but one that implicitly works on post count rather than thanks or an actual reputation score.
Further to that you're actually reinforcing post count as a system of reputation by using the titles such as "Fully Optimized" and "Golden Master" - that fully and somewhat deliberately implies that someone with a high post count is more knowledgeable than someone without!
I don't believe the old system was necessarily the best way of doing things, but it was step up from post count, which is what we're pretty much going back to. As said already a private "thanks" system is really no different from sending a PM, which we have in place already if we choose to use it.
Don't take this the wrong way - I'm not having a go. In a lot of other areas I like what you guys have done, the new logo and theme is much better, we haven't had any security issues since you took over and the site's seemed snappy enough to me! I just think the currently proposed system isn't the best thing for the forums for the reasons I and others have outlined.