I'd say that the author's intent is only relevant to the question of what the author intended their work to mean. I don't see any reason it would be relevant to

I'd say that the author's intent is only relevant to the question of what the author intended their work to mean. I don't see any reason it would be relevant to any other insights or significance that a reader gains from the text. It's similar to how the fact that the cat command was intended to be used to concatenate files is irrelevant to it's more common use to dump a file to stdout.