Discuss HN: Washington post experiment, from an HN perspective

Most of you must have known the Washington post experiment involving Jushua Bell. For others, this is brief version: Joshua Bell donned a baseball cap and played as an incognito street busker at the Metro subway station L'Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C. on January 12, 2007. The experiment was videotaped on hidden camera; among 1,097 people who passed by, only seven stopped to listen to him, and only one recognized him. For his nearly 45-minute performance, Bell collected $32.17 from 27 passersby, from the same set of people who would offer cumulative thousands of dollars for his on show. (full version: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html)

The story obviously raises few interesting and important questions.. one of the I mean to talk about is following: • If all the branding is removed, are we able to recognized raw talent?

My gut answer to the question is (unfortunately), no. Everyday we see marketing taking precedence over true quality. Specially among tech startups (e.g. Zynga rips off some upcoming game developers game and releases nearly identical games and puts huge effort in marketing and gets away with it!)

With all the possibilities of incoming flames, allow me to say that I am noticing something similar in Hacker News as well. I might be partially or totally wrong on this, but it seems like certain topics, certain celebrities, certain blogs and certain HNers (all of it better remain unnamed) gets biased upvoting, sometimes without any quality whatsoever in the content of the post while some smart blogpost written by some unknown dude might never make it to the light of top 30.

I just mean to ask an opinion of fellow hackers on that. Does everybody here feel that only quality is admired on HN and not branding?

P.S. I don't mean to start any flame wars, so in case this post doesn't make sense, feel free to flag it.