I know I'm joining this thread a little late, I'm a not-so-frequent visitor, but if I might interject, I'm a "super moderator" over at Club 3g (http://www.eclipseforums.org/). We have the EXACT same issue with posts, count, titles and custom titles. We seem to have found the proper balance by:

Leaving post counts in place.
Leaving titles in place.
Making posts count in only Eclipse-related forums.
Making custom title available after 1000 posts, otherwise you're relegated to have only the system assigned titles.

This makes it so people have titles only when their counts get high enough, and only get posts for contributing. Anything that is not related or a one word reply gets delete if we stumble on it, and people that post junk (post-whores as we call them) get relegated to off-topic or another forum where their counts don't get tallied. Those forums also get pruned more often.

I'm not saying this si the way you guys should do it, I'm only trying to contribute our solution to what seems to be the same "problem" that you are encountering here. Now the only time people cry foul is when we prune a forum that posts count in.... and if they cry, they get their count re-instated manually. It's not many.

But I do think that counts/ titles help define the people you can trust to give you the real skinny on a problem. Titles? Eh... take 'em or leave them, a join date is just as effective.