I know this is several posts ago, but I wanted to comment on it. Giving rep as an automatic reward for certain accomplishments across a site is a very valid stance to take. It emphasizes how much the site appreciates certain actions, especially if they are actually a challenge to manage.
For the Hive, anyone with a remote sense of anything can get a resource approved. Director's Cut, however, shouldn't be something given out lightly. As a result of that, an automatic 10 reputation for such resources is valid. I've already read your counterargument to this, and that is that:
However, it isn't that the rep is supposed to matter numerically, it's that the rep is supposed to matter in principle. It says "This is really good and the site really likes this kind of thing" when you get that rep - the exact counter to getting an infraction or losing rep for doing something malicious. This is good and a healthy thing to have. If the site actively promotes certain behavior/actions with a desirable reward, that behavior/action becomes more desirable for the user to perform.
You don't need a lot of things - like rep in the first place. The fact that rep's there says that it doesn't matter whether it's necessary or not, the site keeps it so that it's fun and promotes proper behavior. In lieu of that, the case made here makes perfect sense.
You already have in the contests. This wouldn't require you to do anything, it would just require your mods to do something. The mod that approves a DC resource would just shell out 5 or 10 rep (decided by the staff, but presumably constant) to the resource author when it gets made DC. No systems or implementations or whatever, just staff members doing staff things.
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