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I did stumble in the last few days on some post about the reputation. Here is my 2 cents about reputation and an explanation why I do think that reputation does matter.
If I do understand all post, comments and replies correctly, we do have 3 groups of people on steemit if it comes down to reputation.

# The groups
1. The group who does believe that reputation is a valuable asset
2. The group who does not believe that reputation is a valuable asset
3. The group who does not care or who have no idea what reputation is.

# What is reputation?
The Steem whitepaper and the Steemit bluepaper are not really explaning it. But it is the number after your name between (). No it is not the age of the author.
The reputation expresses how trusted or appreciated you are by the community.
Your reputation can increase and decrease. You can buy Steem, SBD and turn these into Steem Power but there is not shortcut for increasing your reputation.
An upvote of a Steemian with a higher reputation and lots of SP, will increase your reputation. If the Steemian who does upvote your post has a higher rep but not lots of SP, your rep will also increase but not as fast.
The same goes for downvotes, but then it could harm your reputation!
As you can see hard work is require to increase your reputation!

You can find lots of good post about how to increase your reputation. These do explain this much better than I can do.

# Is reputation worth some money?
Well no, it does not. Regardless of the amount of reputation you have I will have no impact on the value of your upvote for the author you are upvoting.
I'm not sure about if this is important for the curation reward. I'm sure @abh12345 will have the answer on this question.

# So why do I think that it does matter?
It all has to do with the human nature. People just trust other people faster if they already have a high reputation.
I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of people browsing through the new category and just skip post from Steemians with a reputation below 30. Why do I ask? Couldn't this Steemian be the new star at the firmament? Of are you skipping his posts, because your comment will not give you enough money with an upvote?
That's why it is according to me hard to get noticed in the beginnings. Not only cause you don't have a healthy group of followers but also because people think that your opinion is worth less based on your reputation!

I don't have a scientificial prove for the statement below but I do think that people decide based on the 3 factors below if they are going to read a post, not on their feed, or not.
1. The title: one of the most important things. Do think about the title for your post, maybe think more about it than actually writing the post, it is your first chance to get noticed!
2. The value of the post. If a post has a high enough value people do get interested in it. Maybe just for the possible curation reward of because they think that other Steemians did found it worth an up-vote, so it must be good. Mmh, go through to trending and hot pages and reflect this. Not always the case!
3. The reputation of the author. 

Let's take a deeper look into a simulation for the reputation part.
Suppose we have 2 authors and both have the same quality of writing and are posting about the same subject. Heck, let's assume to both wrote the same exact post.
But one author has a reputation of 50 and the other just started out so a reputation of 25.
Be honest with yourself. Would you be even allured to open both posts? Of do you trust the author with reputation 50 more than the one with 25?
Lots of us, won't even notice the post of the Steemian with a reputation of 25.

So, yes I do think that reputation is more important than it looks. A higher reputation opens more doors, it will give you more opportunities on Steemit, it be easier to get noticed!

Think about it and let me know your ideas about this topic!
To which group do you belong? There is no right or wrong, just let's have an open discussion!

Keep the faith,
Peter