Different perspective here.
People seem to want to use these levels---which can be based on post-counts, likes, and trophies---as a proxy/heuristic answer to the question, "how much should I trust this advice?"
As a data-nerd, I think you're asking too much of that input (post-counts/likes/trophies) to get a useful answer to that question. For people who frequent forums, they pretty much know the drill that these titles do not always guide them to the best advice-givers. For people who don't, such titles can give false impressions. It takes time to delve into a community and suss out those who are the more worthy to listen to. An example of this: Iron Tamer has a like-to-post ratio less than .33, and has 324 posts; I will almost always heed what that man says.
If you don't know a "golden" post when you see one, a general like-count of that person will not help you notice it. What will help you notice it is: a lot of likes on that particular post; people commenting and saying "yea, listen to X"; posts quoting that idea with associated praise; etc.
In answer to the question of "what to do with the metrics/titles?", I think it makes the most sense to just list the metrics (post-counts/likes/trophies) under the names instead of the titles. That way people only see the data themselves and can figure out what to think about it, instead of having a more opaque title-system. (Credit to
@Kettlebelephant for first suggesting this idea.) Listing join date as
@MattM suggested also seems like a good idea.
To me, "like"s are flaky things, and are messed up (from a reliable-data perspective) by humor, likability, forum-participation, and forum-biases. They are not good data to answer the question, "should I listen to this guy/gal"?
EDIT: crafted this in-depth response prior to the newest post by
@Kettlebelephant. Didn't mean to pile on, but that's how it turned out...