Cornwall in November? Ouch. Probably almost as bad as Finland.
I used to be in Carbis Bay near St. Ives. That was July/August, though.

I see t.m.o as a place for interested end users. It does have a high number of developers compared to any average user forum, but they do their dirty talking on the mailing list usually. t.m.o. is just a place where they talk to users. Maybe we'll see other, even more end user related places in the future.

About karma again: Don't forget karma measures community involvement, not your skills at a developer. You can easily collect more karma by writing wiki articles, blogging and filing bugs than a developer who writes brilliant code, but otherwise stays away from maemo.org. That's the purpose of karma: involvement. Not coding. Recieving thanks is an indicator for involvement. You can be thanked for pointless posts, yes, but you can also write nonsensical articles in the wiki or publish useless applications. - In the end, very few people do, and you can't make the karma calculator understand what it counts.

If for some future purpose you would need to measure the amount of development work somebody contributed, you wouldn't use karma for that in the first place. You'd simply count the apps he uploaded and the garage projects he's active in. So again, no reason to change the "thanks".