I don't know why you would call this a "punishment." It makes sense for new users to have more avenues for increasing their reputation, since they need to in order to get more privileges and make a bigger contribution to the site. And if users above 2000 rep could get reputation for editing without overview, what's to stop them from constantly editing the same question over and over again to get reputation in a completely pointless way?

In other words, the act that merits +2 reputation is not the edit but the approval of the edit. That counts as a vote of confidence in the user.

I don't know why you would call this a "punishment." It makes sense for new users to have more avenues for increasing their reputation, since they need to in order to get more privileges and make a bigger contribution to the site. And if users above 2000 rep could get reputation for editing without overview, what's to stop them from constantly editing the same question over and over again to get reputation in a completely pointless way?

The act that merits +2 reputation is not the edit but the approval of the edit. That counts as a vote of confidence in the user.