Agreed, these should be separate.
Plus, can't really do credit stimuli and keep the levels around, or else everyone will be level 100 and you might as well ditch the level system completely at that point.
Yeah I'd be fine with levels just going away.
What would really be cool, though maybe tough behind the scenes, would be to make the level system a formula of (total rep points)/(total # of posts).
That way, you would completely eliminate the "full rep bar problem" and get a better gauge of who a solid poster is. That way, newbies with a high rep per post would stand out against some of the CF punching bags that have just been here forever and slowly racked up a bunch of rep and appear good via the rep bar.