ok i've figured out how to do this, on a very large board it might be a bit harder though.
anyway you query everything
if user have a possitive amount of posts over his or her days on the board along with whether they've been on in the last month and you'll have your regular poster award
you can query the database to see if userid XX has submitted a quiz or not for the Quiz Master award
the same as above for the Photo award (integrated to Photopost)
if userid XX has referals over X then you can give em the Referrer award
Staff member would be more of a conditional if userid XX = usergroupid XX OR XX then give them this award
and stuff like Event Attendee, Contributor, Contest Winner would be manual via the ACP
anyway with all that you set it to run a cron job to update the relevant database settingsand then cache them all for 24 hours or XX hours and you've got your automated awards system.
now i've not had time to bone up on my php

but it would be a great hack, if anyone wants to make it feel free, i'll probably make it an official request when my brain switches on and i can figure out if i'm missing anything.