The reason this matters is that users who were instrumental to Bitcoin like early developers and people who have been shunned from the community as it evolved are penalized by the way Recognition Rank is scored. Vod's argument is that newer users here don't recognize the early names. I don't believe this to be true.
Roger Ver has a Recognition Rank of >1000 &
Gavin Andresen has a Recognition Rank of 865, while
abhiseshakana has a Recognition Rank of 333. Which names do you recognize? What would the ranks be if the original merit were included in the algorithm?
I understand that on the face, there seems to be something that is deficient about Vod's recognition ranking algorithm when bitcoin famous people do not have as much recognition as non-famous bitcoin people, but then again, the algorithm seems to be defining recognition based on "forum activity" criteria, so the question becomes whether the forum member is recognizable in terms of various recent forum participation criteria that Vod has outlined, and attempts to depict recent forum activities, not recognition in a bitcoin objective sense - or some other worldly criteria sense...
There are a lot of famous people in the world, but a large majority of them are not forum famous because they either might not have a forum account or they might not be recently active on their forum account... even satoshi is more recognizable in bitcoin historical terms, but since he has not been active on the forum for many years, with the passage of time, other forum members are going to become more recognizable than satoshi, even though there is always going to be a certain objective recognition (rather than forum recognition) that would be in the minds of people, especially if it comes to someone like satoshi.
It seems to me that Vod's recognition criteria must be in the ballpark - because it seems to be giving greater weight to the recognition of forum members based on recent forum activity rather than historical (even bitcoin historical) activity.