even contributed to the code

NOICE! Thank you for your service to this community:-).

PieFed seems to have a good feature specific to this case

Yeah, it's odd b/c on the one hand it has SO VERY MANY features that Lemmy lacks - such as categories of communities, hashtags in posts, YouTube video embedding, showing the community sidebar area for every post (not just on the community page), even on a mobile, and using radically (~25-fold) less mobile data to load 5x more posts at a time than Lemmy. Also, I just subscribed to a new community created last week, and like 2 seconds later it had already pulled in all the old posts.

On the other hand, PieFed lacks many of the more "foundational" feature sets, e.g. user tagging (so I just happened to see this, but the @OpenStars@piefed.social will not alert me to the tagging as you would expect & hope), and a good fraction of the time I get a Notification to something that I have no idea what it is - sometimes I cannot click it at all, sometimes it is from users that I've blocked, sometimes it is buried in the "continue thread" or whatever that is called where instead of showing the content on the page you have to click to go to some other page entirely (yet the Notifications refuses to follow that), or inside an auto-collapsed or even an auto-removed comment (but at the time that I replied to it, it had not yet been auto-removed, which is why I just turned that entire feature off). I am glad that you are helping bring it up to feature parity with Lemmy though!:-) It is such a fantastic project that I think will radically transform people's experiences on the Fediverse, by offering them tools that at this point I doubt that Lemmy ever will.

reputation points (though I have a feeling this could also be abused?)

And yes I do share that same worry. OTOH, people can already do it now, it's just that it takes far more effort, and for the most part the existing options are "block the account" or "nothing", or in certain Lemmy apps (I don't know which ones, maybe Connect or Sync b/c they seem more full-featured?) you can add your own custom label to the account like "hey this person is fun to talk to but don't ever bring up Hamas or YOU WILL BE SORRY". Probably more than one person has added "long-winded" to describe me:-). The beauty of that is that it allows people the CHOICE to do something other than the binary remove vs. retain, like they could read but not reply, or reply but not go into as much depth as they usually would, or like for a new account the content of their reply might be more explanatory than it would if they knew that someone had had an account here for more than a year. Knowledge is power:-). As such, it might be abused:-(. Then again, it might not?:-D

Since we are talking about merely placing labels next to a username - not like automatically blocking or hiding content from people (that capability does not exist... yet) - I don't worry so much about its potential for abuse at the current stage. But even if the stage were to be advanced - which it seems NOT ready yet atm, imho, but if it were more fully developed - then I should add: even the trolls might have more fun on the Fediverse that way, if the people most likely to respond negatively to them have hidden their content? Thereby leaving only those most likely to respond favorably to their antics.

So for me, it's not that it's a 100% bad thing, just that care must be taken in its further development. If the actual restrictions were quite narrow, and the mere labelling wider, that does not sound like a bad trade-off to me?