Hi, similarly, I just read this, so sorry for delayed response :-)

Voting CAN affect what is written, but it doesn't have to. That's mostly up to the writer. If the primary goal of their writing is financial reward, then yes, voting will probably affect it.

This can definitely be perceived as a weakness of the current system, but in fairness to myself I will point out that I didn't design the primary economics of Hive, nor do I think removing downvotes would solve the issues related to the economics. I do have some ideas for long term improvements to the current model, but there's a lot of code that needs to be written first and I haven't even started yet.