Thank-you Charyb for investigating this and posting what you found. I recently came back to AVAST, and looking around the interface and settings to see if the company has shed a lot of the excess baggage that made me leave in 2014. Thankfully, it's looking like AVAST Anti-virus is lean and mean once again.
Thanks to your info, I've decided to leave "Reputation Services" turned on. It helps Avast be a better Anti-Virus provider, which in turn helps all of us.
Cheers,
-Allen in Chicagoland