Meanwhile, if you actually manage to answer or document some tricky, obscure thing, then often it never gets enough traffic to earn much reputation. Mine is still pretty low, but my highest-rep answer is a one-liner, telling somebody that Mercurial can't track files outside of the repository root directory structure. Meanwhile, an actual challenging, obscure answer, like the one on running ASP.NET with C++ dlls (hint: avoid if at all possible) gets very little.
Asking good questions helps too, but I usually find it faster to look it up or figure it out myself than to format a decent question and wait for responses.