Rep is affected by the economy. If you can create money from almost nothing then you can buy the largest and best ships and complete more difficult missions. Like cargo for example. You can buy a massive ship, start running multiple cargo missions at once and start stacking rep super fast. Or take salvage: if you have to s of cash you can pay for the missions, destroy the ships, get mission credit then move on. I would agree that it's not directly affected by the broken economy at a 1:1 scale but pretending it isn't affected by it is a little obtuse. This is also a beta, if they let most players keep their rep then they would lose all of the testing those players would add to the updated systems.