[fdej]

Publishing in the most prestigious journals is hugely important. The first thing many academic hiring/promotion/grant committees look at is how many Nobel Prizes you've won, the second thing is how many publications you have in Nature or Science. Everything else is just for breaking ties. I've even heard that there are fields where having any conference publications counts against you.

[cyphar]

That's not the experience I've had in my faculty. My supervisor has referred to Nature and Science as "shiny PR journals". Besides, citations are what actually matter, because they show how popular your work is within the community. Why else would people who write cool software (GNU Parallel, Scipy, Numpy, etc) all ask for citations for their papers? If all that matters is "getting it published" and not "getting it cited", then they shouldn't care, right?