All right, well, it looks like I'm dredging up something everyone else is finished with, but I'd like to talk about the merits of the money analogies.
Using money as a stand-in for votes, we're not considering having a $100 bill or $100 in pennies. We're considering a person who has both a $100 bill and $100 dollars in pennies. The question is, which better sums up the state of this man's finances: “he has 200 dollars,” or “his largest bill is a hundred.”
I'd also like to point out that our current system is a hybrid of quantity and quality. A system of pure quantity would show the total number of up-voted posts with the number of up-votes on any give post being irrelevant. In the money analogy, it would be “he has 101 pieces of currency.”