Is it possible for us to have the benefits of voting without the nonsense that comes with it?

Isn’t that essentially what Lemmy has? You can vote on comments, you can see the score of an individual comment, but there’s no aggregate score on user profiles, so the incentive to karma farm just isn’t there. Sure, there’ll be people who just really want to get high-scoring posts, and operate with that mindset, but I think it’s far, far less than on Reddit.