What caused me to start questioning it is when I went to another instance and saw a different vote count, so it was the mismatch, plus this behavior where it occurred too quickly to be due to human intervention, thus not matching my naive "expectations".

That doesn't make it "bad" imho, though it does take some getting used to. Now that you've explained it I even like the idea - I've had similar thoughts in the past, like Wikipedia and "web of trust" that weights more highly those who contribute more whereas those who contribute the opposite of more (not just less but fully anti) could get downweighted. Obviously all the notes of due caution apply, where you don't want like a mod to outweigh 100 normal users, but you've considered that I'm certain:-). And just 1 extra I don't feel like is excessive at all.

Another alternative as you said would be to have the sorting algorithm use it without displaying the individual voting differently. I am not sure I would like that though - the way it is now provides transparency, whereas that would "hide" it. Perhaps if there's a FAQ that explained it, that would help people get over the counter-intuitiveness of it all? Even if writing that might be better saved for another day.

Still another alternative would be to not change the individual vote counts (not even just how they appear but the actual underlying counts, as affecting sorting) but display the "high value" badge next to the name. I've seen the low value badges, even doubled ones. Mine has a non-spinning in-progress one so I presume that means that it is still assessing, with it being so new. Edit: oh wait, no this is not well-thought-out, sorry - this would only work to identify posters/commenters with a high reputation score, but it would do nothing to help their votes on other posts/comments. So ignore this.

But the idea that immediately pops out of my head that I already like the best is to display (1) the user valuation badges next to the name, and (2) show the up & down-vote counters separately (b/c it's information - ah, and I see the hover effect now, on my laptop! though it does take nearly a whole second to appear, so most people aren't likely to find that just by poking around I would guess; therefore thanks again to cluing me in on it!:-)), plus possibly also (3) the combined score - and the latter could take into account all the various "weighting" factors. e.g. if I were an account that is high-value, yet I received 2 downvotes from likewise high-value accounts, plus 2 more from normal, plus 10 upvotes from normal, then it would put it all into the algorithm that could spit out a score closer to zero than to 7. The reason I like it is that while it did not immediately dawn on me, coming from Lemmy, before that Kbin, and before that Reddit, that an "upvote" would be anything other than an "upvote", yet it doesn't seem counter-intuitive to me at all that a "weighted total score" would not be a simple sum of the up and down votes. This provides full transparency, full consistency with other servers and approaches (Lemmy, eventually Sublinks, etc.), and also the exact number that is used in the sorting, with the algorithm that generates that explainable elsewhere. The downside is that it is the busiest display of all - though for those of us who enjoy "information", we will love it! Perhaps a Theme or other Setting could hide a great deal of it for those who do not enjoy such.

I hope you like the idea to think about, whatever you end up doing!:-)

And I seem to have hit a text limit. Oops. Well, I will need to hold myself back in the future but for now, if you are okay with it, this will be part 1 of 2.