We are close to 50 Experts. 49, to be exact. That's a LOT. I know, people deserve Expert having gotten six thousand points and all that, but say one person who's an Expert got hacked? It happens, and could cause a lot of trouble. Besides that, it puts a lot of power in the hands of those who don't need it, want it or maybe deserve it. It's become more of a trend than an accomplishment. "Yay, I'm Expert" is the usual plain reaction on someone's profile.
My suggestion is that you raise it back to ten thousand, like before. This will raise dedication to the site, improve quality of answers, and overall make everyone better at answering questions. Like, remember Halcyonic Falcon? He worked real hard to become Expert at the time when it was ten thousand. Another thing, the question quality isn't that great. Sure we have some hard-to-answer questions, but most are something someone can easily answer, and I think that it's not right that people can editing powers because they know where to find Everstones.
You don't have to agree with me, but at least hear me out. See this and check how many Experts there are, most aren't even active. So, in short, my suggestion is raise the Expert reaching points to ten thousand. That will take out a good fraction of Experts and lower the "OP privileges rate". Although I'm still rooting for being able to get and odd number of points.
Why not just back to the idea of hand-picked Experts like so many people wanted? I think that's a much better idea.
>And think about it, the site's growing. Just as there's more and more questions being asked, there's more and more answers. There's been a flood with people with 1000 points on Meta recently, something that used to be an actual achievement/milestone in points.
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement, this is another option. Handpicked Experts.