I have no problems with the hidden posts.  Once you get trusted (participate) enough, you can see them and unhide them if necessary.  The only people who won't be able to see the hidden posts are basically anonymous visitors.  You can also see who rates posts, which will probably discourage rating tyrants.

On the new labels for the ratings, it seems counter-intuitive to call anything with a positive number "bad".  Can't you set up the "bad" ratings with negative numbers?  Just a nitpick really.

A couple of other minor suggestions.  Is there any way to change the labels on dispatches and log entries?  Perhaps to Articles and Blog Entries?  The terminology seems a little wacky to unfamiliar users such as myself :)

How do sections work?  Will there be a navigation block for the sections?  What about a spellchecker?

It would also be nice if users could rate the dispatches, or at least see the ratings that were assigned by whoever approved the dispatches.  Don't know if that is configurable or is a limitation of the implementation...