Who says rep has to come from helping people in the General Hardware/Software section anyway? Where does it say you can't earn rep from telling off a certain member or whatever?
I don't see why people have to kick up such a fuss over something as trivial as green boxes that appear in your postbit. How do you define rep being 'abused'? Nobody ever said rep could only be left for certain things (ex. helping people) and if that were the case, it would have been disabled in the Social Lounge (or everywhere outside the technical and GHS forums) anyway.
Like seriously, what's the big deal?