I think that the problem of 'committer shows up as 'rep=1' is not a big problem.
The existing moderation circus on SO seems to work reasonably well, and it isn't tag-specific. If committers show up and answer questions, they'll get upvotes, and eventually acquire privileges. I can't predict how Atwood & crew would react to a proposed treat with us. The non-tag-specific nature of moderation privileges is a fairly big practical problem for any scheme to give Apache people ex-officio reputation -- unless we went for the 'apache.stackoverflow.com / stackoverflow.apache.com' separate site route.
