Most likely super useless post but I guess the blog-ish nature of the platform is fine for a ramble like this.
While I'm aware reputation is insanely gamer on Steem, it's safe to assume that if for nothing, then for audience engagement strength, it's a good measure.
Now, my reputation was stuck very, very close to 50, extremely slowly increasing from ~46 towards 49. It was 49 back in March when I decided to take a break on using Steem.
Since that, I powered up quite a lot (all my available crypto actually, tired of trading and losing - or hodling and losing), delegated to many great services, rearranged my autovoting and try to curate the possible best way, while also aligning things to my preferences. That is, I never upvote market analysis, for instance.
Anyways, 50 means somewhat much for me; it has some psychological effect on people seeing my name here.
And even if I have nothing else to gain on a gamed metric, still I'm glad for 50.