@CrabBucket
If someone decided to give away a big chunk of their rep it would undermine this a bit.
The real world works like that though: if I trust someone and they trust someone else then I might believe their assessment of trustworthiness (you do that if you trust employees of trusted institutions).
Just a thought
It's a good thought.
Another idea might be that on CodeReview.SE they have some kind of topic on their meta for proposing good answers. For example we could have a "Best of 2015" topic on our meta, in which we invite people to submit (as an answers) a short list of their favourite posts from the last year.
That needn't be specifically/exclusively for new users (but it could be if that were a good idea, e.g. "Good questions or answers by new users").
And there could be bounty associated with that.
Another benefit is that I'd be able to review some posts which other people thought were especially good, and perhaps read their explanation for why they think they're especially good/useful.