I don't think this is a foregone conclusion. Numbers measuring proximity are useful. I.e., I'd rather know how many miles from my house someone lives than have google tell me travel time will "require a vehicle". People misinterpreting WoT numbers (which are a reasonably novel concept in social media, though not unprecedented) is a problem of importing popularity-concept metrics into a new medium. There are many ways to think about this problem, and I think you may be leaping to overly-opinionated solutions too quickly. 

 I agree this is early to tell if a number is useless. But it can definitely be misleading. A distribution of those scores will most probably be power law - top guy having multiples higher score. To an average person it would seem as if top guy is 3x "better", while that's definitely not the case. How and when the numbers are presented is probably a very important question.