Irrelevant; does spam never occur just because you've made a rule about it? No.
Actually it is relevant. Any post spamming is very easily found and moderated, thus stopping it completely in the end. Thanks has no such restrictions on it.
Is post-spam's visibility altered by rules? No; it's an inherent feature of post spam. And have you
completely stopped spamming by having a rule against it? *Checks the ever-growing banlist*. Hmm, didn't think so. And the post count doesn't just limit itself to encouraging spam in order to increase the 'score'. Low content posts and shitposts bump up the post count very nicely. That's not beneficial to the site, but the public post count remains. This is inconsistent with your view on the alleged negative aspects of a public thanks-count.
And if this alleged thanks-spamming is so difficult to detect in the first place,
where you have total thanks displayed makes no logical difference; you won't be able to notice any significant change anyway. You have no idea if widespread thanks abuse is
already occuring. Besides your personal assertion to the contrary there's no reason to think that a 'extra click' makes any difference at all.
You have the Zoklet userbase. This was never a significant problem on Zoklet.
I'd have to be there to say for sure.
Are none of us competent or trustworthy enough to convince you otherwise?
And that was then. This is now.
I know what the timeline is, thank you.
And also, I plan to have more members than just past Zoklet members in the future.
As you point out... this is now. That's the future.
Unless your future objective is to recruit a userbase that is so shitty it will abuse the thanks system, I don't see what the problem is.