I'm loving the Steemit education course, there's always some nugget of gold in each post. Sometimes more.

Another good tool for checking reputation, voting power, votes, comments and the like is steemworld.org. Granted you do need to have it open in another tab, but it has a wealth of information in there.

I do think reputation has an indirect benefit in as much as others may be more likely to at least check out your post if you have a higher reputation. The post still needs to be of high quality to make that tendency worth anything. If you're posting garbage the higher click-through will just serve to wreck your efforts at creating a tribe, and could even lead to some of you followers leaving you.

So, I agree with you - don't worry about your reputation, but instead focus on posting high quality content if you want to grow on Steemit.