Airdropping based on reputation was actually bad... people can get lot's of reputation easily with voting bots nowadays, i know people that had 5 or 6 accounts that used voting bots to get those account at plus 60 rep and got enough byteball for a new laptop!
But i see your point, airdropping to people on steemit is actually quite good IMO, we have a large crypto community airdropping to us is good for them!
I know. The root of the reputation problem, however, is paid upvote bots. The Byteball folks didn't quite understand this.