I find knowing authorial intent to be very important. I may disagree, and even interpret their work differently than they wrote/interpret it, but I am most enriched if I can suss out even a silhouette of the original intention of the author.
One way of showing what I mean would be if you take the rather famous example of correlation fallacy, that the decreasing number of pirate ships is correlated to the increase of global warming and therefore we can solve global warming with an increase in our number of pirate ships; you can interpret the point of this story to mean that there are so many correlated and confounding factors around climate change that we simply can't have enough data to make a good decision about what to do.
A little research into the story and the author reveals this to be untrue, and now, knowing more about the intent, I feel that I have a better understanding of how he sees things, and his use of metaphor. Things I read by him in future will be perceived with a deeper sense, and all the while I continue to see that his stories, metaphors, etc., hold separate values in my conclusions.[DOUBLEPOST=1399590965,1399590788][/DOUBLEPOST]
Hmm, would you say quality / import has an effect on authorial intent?
I would say that quality makes no difference in terms of authorial intent, but that the importance of resolving authorial intent is lessened, personally, in things I find to be poorly done, or do not enjoy. Nonetheless, I think the author's intent remains impactful on how I would understand the work, were I to read it.