Link for ranked list is 404. Any list anywhere that shows the ranking independent of honour?

Yes that is all correct. The leaderboard is dominated by people who have authored a lot of content, completed a ton of kata and who have had their solutions up voted a lot.

You can go here to see a ranked list. Soon, you will be able to filter any list by rank.

Good question. The honor and level systems are completely independent of each other, with the only thing linking them is that you get a small honor bonus for levelling/ranking up.

Honor is meant to be a combination of effort put into the site + how much that effort has been useful to others. You get it for a lot of ways, the main ones being by completing and authoring kata, and getting up votes for kata, comments and solutions that you create.

Kyu/Dan ranks are meant to represent your skill level and correlates to how they are used in martial arts (and Go). The idea being that by having both kata and warriors ranked with a particular level, it becomes much easier to know what types of challenges a warrior should be given. Ranks also become a goal for you to try to reach as you grow your development skills.

You can see this page for a description of how honor and rankings work. The max kyu is 1 kyu after which you move into the dan system (expert/black belt). Once warriors get into the dan system its a whole different world. We have a lot of amazing things planned for advancing within the dan system.

Interested also. I got the impression that there has been and may still be a hard limit on max kyu. Can't remember which conversation gave that impression, though.

Edit: For the record, I'm at 378 right now. At 360, I was around about half way to 3 kyu and I am now coming up on 5/8ths, so progress is still visible at this level. I'm not expecting to see it move towards 2 kyu, though I could be wrong.