I respectfully disagree with your dismissal of how damaging downvotes are to Hive. It could be considered censorship under some definitions and even if it's not censorship, it IS something equally (or even more) harmful.

Downvotes allow centers of power to maintain and grow that centralization which is antithetical to the ethics of decentralization and freedom. It allows one person with a large amount of HP to negate the votes of hundreds of others and simultaneously prevent them from increasing their HP. This just creates an oligarchy where the peasants have to be careful to not upset the elite.

Advocates for downvoting will argue that no one is entitled to make money from their blog posts. It's not just about money though. Using your own words about the utility of HP, downvoting allows centers of power to arbitrarily decide to:

• Deny people "the ability to transact and influence governance on a truly censorship-resistant network"
• Prevent the ability to "spread the token's inflation and secure the network"
• Stop "encouraging new stakeholders"

I truly believe that downvoting is the one thing that will hold back HIVE the most. We might be building something worse than traditional social media if we are creating a future where sharing a negative experience dealing with a major corporation results in an account funded by a business association downvoting all your posts to zero for the rest of your life. Either it will have to be reformed in a hard fork or posts and comments will have to be moved to sidechains or custom_json transactions where downvoting can't occur.