Rewarding "downvotes" = a pandoras box.

As far as I know, there is no proposal that includes rewarding downvotes. The proposed change is just a pool of free downvotes that is separate from the current number of votes each user can cast. No rewards can be earned from downvotes unless a separate protocol is coded to change that.

...at the end of the day Steem needs a lot more than just fiddling around with internal numbers to make it everything it can be.

Yeah, definitely. But some of the numbers need to be "fiddled with" in order to make the economic protocols more coherent and more stakeholder-friendly. Too many bad decisions were made with prior hard forks. It'll take quite a few rollbacks/changes to correct that.