I don't think that the sheer number of posts that someone makes is a good indicator of their contribution. There are a large number of "me too" and uninformative posts which make the forum less rewarding to follow. There was already an incentive to post indiscriminately via the "Newbie", "Junior Member", "Full Member" thing and this will just make it worse as people race to make 250 posts.
Post counts do indicate that a person has been able to survive for a while on the forum without being banned, which has some value. I agree that it's useless for measuring someone's contributions.
Gavin was throwing around the idea of switching to a mailing list, presumably because he too was having similar problems with the forum.
I was not particularly keen on a mailing list at that point but I'm much more equivocal now.
I find mailing lists difficult to deal with, but I would love to see a Bitcoin NNTP sever.
Is it Sirius who makes these forum decisions? Sirius alone or an ad-hoc committee?
Mods and admins act mostly independently. I'm not going to change the limit, since I want the reputation system to be completely removed.