Thx for the interesting answer. This conversation has just made me realized I need to spend a bit more time to completely wrap my head around the concept of how exactly a reputation is affected and also how the curation reward system really works.
Thanks to you and to this post by @arcange, I should have a much clearer idea on the topic. :-)
https://steemit.com/steemit/@arcange/what-is-steemit-reputation-and-how-does-it-works