disagreeing (why even upvote?)

I think a bit disagreement is good for the discussion and gives further insights. Otherwise discussions often degenerate to an exchange of some further upvotes, but do not add anything substantial.

make sure you have a high reputation score, success stories, books you've written, your life stories or a high investment (proof of financial success).

To evaluate a person here, I rather look how reasonable this person appears according to their writing and voting behaviour, everybody leaves a trace on the blockchain.

High reputation score means little, people can buy bot votes to upvote their mediocre or even low-quality posts, some whales upvote BS. On the internet one cannot be sure if stories are real, how much people did themselves for the success. Also not clear how much of their property people invested in steem, and how people got their steempower, there are scammers and plagiarists who made thousands before being discovered. Often the steempower mainly indicates when someone started here and what was the steem price then. There are big whales out here who believe that the earth is flat. And look at all that conspiracy theory nonsense on the trending pages backed by big amounts of steempower.

And to rate a comment or advise sometimes it's not necessarily to know the background of the person, at least if it itself makes sense. Sometimes people just give some inputs and when one has time one can research whether or not it helps.

Though I agree your above criteria may give some priorities what/whom to research, when one doesn't have time for all one is confronted with.

and just downvote me. It has been like 4 months and that is not the case yet.

Well, you are lucky, in your case people seem to be lenient.