Not a ramble, that's a healthy conversation which i like, in general i like long posts and comments and i tend to do the same as well :P

Right now we pay for manual farms and bot farms. This is the kind of content we sacrifice HIVE price for.

This was always the case, i don't know how long you are here, but in Steemit days it was like x20 than the current state. I agree though that this is still a thing. In terms of $$ though, the amount of money that is spent on DHF is far, far bigger and one of the reasons hive's price keep on going down.

People write things they don’t like for communities they don’t care about. So they sell the HIVE; they don't cherish the content they made so don't cherish the HIVE they earned.
People don’t care if they get downvoted for spam. Everyone else is doing it, why can’t I?
Well not everyone is doing it. Most “whales” have good content. The ones that don’t usually get downvoted by other whales

I agree with that and each community needs to somehow identify that and cast them aside. At the same time, anyone can downvote them if they believe that. The hard part is how to identify whether someone actually likes or not what he posts. For me, in most cases it's hard to tell from here so if i am not 100% sure i am not going to downvote anyone. How can you tell though?

Also i agree that most whales have good content but we can't compare it like this. Whales are like (i am saying a random number) 100 people while everyone else is like a 10000 people. Also most whales are in trending and hot page constantly so it's easier to tell than, for example manually discovering who abuses and who doesn't, that's why each community should pay a lot of attention to that.

Btw you never know who abuses, throughout the years that i was in Steemit and now here, literraly from every "class" they tried to abuse and take advantage of the token in the expense of others. Owners, Whales, Dolphins, you name it.
A couple of 1-2 weeks ago, a community called vibes held for many months maybe more a singing contest, where people would sing based on thematology, a judge would judge them and the winner would get an HBD amount. Cool idea to attrach people outside of him as well i would say.

At a certain point the judge decided to text random contestands and told them that he will grant them victory if they would share an x amount of their earnings :P

Downvoting is really powerful but it needs to have boundaries. We need to be certain before casting it as we basically not only deeming someone an "abuser" in way but we are also making him lose money. We need to be responsible of the power we hold and use it for the benefit of the ecosystem, creating a thriving community and not a community that will fear to say something that a whale doesn't like, or to count the number of words and such! Boundaries above everything i would say!