Hey, @Resonator. First off I'd like to thank you for this post, and the opportunity to discuss Hive and curation.
Also, many thanks for your manual curation efforts, including some recent support for my content. It has taken me 5 years (full time) of totally independent decentralized effort, not to mention investment and risk, in order to build my reputation and audience to the current point. I am an unbanked activist, husband, and father of 2 babies living in BC Canada. My dream has been to generate some crypto income by doing what I already love, creating original high quality content on topics like freedom, privacy, cannabis as medicine, activism, free markets, the Covid scam, monetary theory, etc. It tends to be stuff that gets censored by the mainstream, and attacked by statists. I am finally getting close to achieving a stable income of about 30 HIVE per post, each of which takes me about a day to research, photograph, write, etc. At current prices that's about $30 a day, which would be enough to cover some of my family's monthly costs. I'm approaching my first power down and test payout. Thanks to the support of excellent manual curators of independent content, some of my posts reached payouts around 40 HIVE recently.
Unfortunately, this seems to have attracted the disdain of blockchain bullies who are hitting me with large ($3 to $30+) downvotes. These accounts have higher rep than I do, so they're not only just removing my payouts, they're knocking my rep score down. Like I wrote in the linked post, I don't care about rep from an ego standpoint whatsoever. But it does have functional impacts on how this blockchain works. For example, posts and comments by low rep accounts are automatically pushed to the bottom of each feed or screen. If low enough, they are annotated with a warning, put behind a click-wall, and grayed out. As you write above, accounts and posts (usually) don't get outright deleted, but censorship is still absolutely possible here, and happening all the time. Hundreds of high quality content-creators like myself have been lost in recent months, thanks to these downvoting whale bullies. The agenda is to hide/downplay certain content, like Freedom Convoy. I notice they even went after the @freedomconvoy account's posts - and comments! Knocked it down in rep from 56 to 53. A few more days of that, and @freedomconvoy will be effectively gone.

This is not acceptable in my opinion, but what can I do? Whenever I confront people like this about their actions, they downvote me in retaliation, losing me even more money and visibility. If they respond at all, they say "how it works is you buy a bunch of HIVE and then you can downvote me back". So my only recourse is to play their game? Not only would I never do that, but I don't have $2 million to blow on HIVE. I'm living on next to nothing and have no savings except my HIVE balance I've worked tirelessly to accumulate. They are literally 1000 times larger than me. It takes them almost no effort or resources to completely remove all my payouts and all but scrub me from sight. I haven't broken any platform rules, I'm not plagiarizing, I'm not spamming, I'm not scamming. My content is what HIVE is made for. I'm finally barely pulling in 40 bucks for a day's work, and now I'm being knocked back to nothing for it? This is why HIVE can't grow, and why it is actually bleeding out good content-creators. I don't do this only for the money, but I've worked 5 years to get here, and I've yet to see my first cent for it. Many of these whales have been pulling in huge circle-jerk profits since this chain began, and they make hundreds on each of their nonsense spam posts, clogging up Trending with self-promotion and garbage. And many of them are going around UN-curating, undoing the good work that you and other quality curators are spending your time and resources on. Punishing complete strangers they see as competition - up and comers like myself. I recently broke into the top 1000 for rep (so less than 1000 people can negatively effect my score aka make efforts to censor me). I clawed my way up to #950 last week, before being sent tumbling back down by those high-rep whale downvotes. It would take them a while, but they could reduce me to nothing, and in the process, prevent me from accumulating any more HIVE and competing with them.

I love so many things about HIVE and I'm thankful for many things I've learned here. I also realize it is not what it could be, and we are being held back at a crucial time.

I think my comment has touched on most of the 6 categories you mentioned in your post. I hope you see this as constructive discussion. Maybe we can come up with solutions, or at least just be more actively conscious of the problem. Thank you!