How important is the breed, when you are choosing a dog is another question, that has no unique, simple answer.
Through many years, humans have adapted dogs to ourselfs on that level, that we can now almost choose a dog, that we want. Smart, slow, fast, with antialergic fur, looking nice, large, small, with low- or high-energy level, adjusted for living in appartment or outside, you can even choose a purpose…just name it and you will get it. The dog’s breeds are created to put dogs with simmilar physical an psychological characteristics in to the different “sectors”. It everything seems nice and usefull…but…we should not forget on the other hand, that it is hard to supervise such a selective breeding processes all over the world. Therefore such a selective breeding brought us also bunch of side effects which are shown as a predispositions for diseases, body malfunctions, psychological problems. Although this is a subject of another endless discussion of wrong and right, we need to be awared of it.
It is very important, that we choose a dog, which will be in accordance to our lifestyle. And in this stage it is nice to have a general informations about main characteristics of a breeds. It makes our decision easier. It does not mean, that we need to choose a pure breeded dog, not at all. It can easily be mixed breeded.
If we are getting an adult dog, we can see and estimate his physical and psycological condition, so it is easier to deicide about suitability of the dog according to our lifestyle. In this case breed is not so important, because we already see, what kind of a dog we are getting.