Sure. But you can also get a lot of respect just by announcing that it's your birthday, or that you are getting married, or that your kid was just born. Or that your post:respect ratio is approaching 1:1. Those are all awesome things and I'll +1 them to say "that's awesome!" but it doesn't mean that the person is making the forum a better place.
Conversely, there are also people who make the forum a better place by being great participants in the forum games board, but they receive no +1s because it's disabled there and they don't post much on the regular boards.
I don't put much stock in the actual respect count because it's such a generic measure. It doesn't tell me if you are especially funny, or if you are really good at Dominion. I suppose you can get some info out of the measure, but I already know those things just by interacting with the people in the forums and reading their content myself.
But you can be pretty sure that a high respect count doesn't tell you that a user is having birthdays often, getting married often, or approaching a 1:1 post:respect ratio all the time.
Besides, would you +1 someone who just registered here to tell us that he's getting married? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't. People receive +1s for these posts because the community already knows them and likes them. Just like it is with IRL presents: you don't give them to random people just because it happens to be their birthday. You give them to your friends, and the reason is not that it's their birthday, the reason is that they are your friends. I think that this is fine, since pretty much all of the active users here write posts that might be worth fractional respect points in everyone's opinion, but not enough to get an actual +1 from anyone.
Anyway, I think that a high respect count should be treated not like a trophy, but more like your porn folder: it's a very nice thing to have, but not really something that you should be bragging about.
