Is it just me, or is this topic sort of turning into a place where people brag about the length of their reviews, rather than the amount they have written?

Personally, I would be ok with the removal of the ranking system. I must admit that those statuses look too nice and shiny when one visits J2O for the first time, and I have written a lot of idiot reviews myself a few years ago. Any sort of ranking system just appeals too much to the human sense of competition (remember when the JCF had post counts?). I'm not quite sure if taking the length of the reviews into account would solve the problem. It might just encourage people to write longer spam reviews (something along the lines of "This level is very very [insert 500 "very" here] very good"; copy/paste does work rather well that way). People would just start trying to write the longest reviews instead of the most.