I agree with you 100%, I have repeatedly predicted Steem's success will stand and fall with the interfaces and analytics tools and filters that will be developed and used a gif from the Zion approach scene in "Matrix Revolution" each time:
I'd be much less concerned if the rep system were simply a metric computed by the interface, a short analysis calculated by summing up- and downvotes somehow. But lo and behold, https://steemd.com/@dwinblood says there is a new cell in the database:
Reputation: 6,233,550,417,451
And it did not even seem to require a hardfork, unlike the update to get rid of the liquidity reward bug using.
Other interfaces will not have such luxuries.