No, it is relevant because people will stop using Ripple the more times they have to pay for other people.
As I said, we're not relying on community/social credit. We're promoting Ripple as a payment system based on gateways. The social credit system will always be there should people be ready to use it. I agree that it's difficult to use safely right now, hard to understand, and so on. Much better tools will be needed, and even then it may never catch on. I genuinely believe that one day it will be Ripple's killer app and will transform the way people think about money and finance. But we're not relying on it.
The more hops there are, the more likely this is going to happen.
The number of hops has no effect on the number of people who owe you money. There's just no connection at all.
It really tells you when one of the employees doesn't even know their own system.
Ask yourself this: Do you want to owe someone money because someone owed you money? Do you want to owe someone money because someone owed you money as another person owed that someone money?
Unless you like paying out of pocket for the mistakes and scams of others, ripple is destined to fail. There's no killer app for something that has a critical flaw in the logic, execution and pure greed of the developers.