To expand on the notes thing, I think that as long as you can access all the notes in a post from one point, e.g. the root post, you have basically preserved the important part which is getting to see everything going on under a post, and maybe added a valuable addition (being able to see branches of a post), the clout is real but not that real, e.g. note farming with "oh no don't let this post get 100k notes" is basically an annoyance.
I think the ideal behaviour would probably be more like "each reblog with content constitutes a new branch which gets all the notes below it, but that number is not shown anywhere" because this would let you follow an offshoot of a post more easily which is often what you want to do.