Is it currently possible to disable rating of topics, so that topics don't ratings and nobody can rate topics? If not, does anyone agree such an ability would be a good addition to Eve? Same with karma points, I'd love to be able to completely remove all mention of karma points from my community!

You can disable/remove the ratings column in the control panel. You have to do it for each forum, though.

Go to the forum Details > Display tab, and uncheck the box for "Enable Topic Rating." You'll also want to uncheck the box for "Display Rating Column" in the previous section of the same page.

You can remove the Karma column from the members directory if you use it. Some sites also use the Wordlet tool to find all instances of "Karma" and change it to "points" or "post count" or "merit" or some other term that suits the site.