I've had this hunch for the longest time, even during the initial kneejerk against reddit gold.

I think the idea behind gilding/awarding/whatever they decide to call it--is fantastic. Adequately distributed: it provides a great counterbalance to downvoting as a mechanism to hide low-quality posts.

Sooner or later you have to accept that everybody uses the vote buttons as an "agree" / "disagree" button, so the best you can do is allow some users to 'push' through the downvotes with a mechanism to draw attention to otherwise unpopular but (ideally) higher quality submissions.

Does it always shake out this way in practice? No. But this is pretty good news for my headcanon.