In between hearing music the way a child hears it (which adults can only dimly imagine) and reading it the way standard notation presents it (which any sensible musician will tell you doesn't make much musical sense) there is a huge gap.

Which is more important: to be able to read music or to be able to make music?

Don't misunderstand me: I value reading music enormously. But I respect the distance between these two very different skills -- so much so that I will work with anyone who has trouble reading for whatever reason. As a result I keep learning more and more about the life of sound itself, without an interface of notation or of theory or of any other system of indirect reference.