Here is the terrible truth no one wants to deal with:

It's already too late.

Long past too late.

It is absolutely impossible to move to some other accumulation of popular sentiment mechanism outside of the way the blockchain is currently architected. No changes to condenser would do that because that information is required to be individualized, and as you have already read yourself, the whole idea of the way the blockchain is structured is not individualization but specifically commodified collectivism.

There is no way to abandon the concept and still have an architecture.

Content sorting, along with a multitude of discovery mechanisms which I and others have been talking about for two years or more, are not what 80% of the people involved with the development of the Steem blockchain are interested in. They're just not interested in that. Despite the fact that the last two decades of social media platform development have moved from collectivist assumptions about how platform discovery occurs and inevitably toward more individualized approaches, the people developing for Steemit and applications which are integrated with the Steem blockchain are simply uninterested. In part because that kind of information requires its own database in order to track and understand information of that class.

Under the hood, "the blockchain" is just fancy handwaving height-speak for "a database." It's a distributed database with a low-trust consensus mechanism, but it's just a database. Individualized personal information which results in personal presentation would require a parallel database which constructs an individualized view of the content of the blockchain. At that point, you're forced to realize that storing mass content is in the problem these days. There are a multitude of decentralized methods of data synchronization which are a lot more efficient and effective than "a blockchain." The only selling points are the hype and the notional returns from the gambling mechanism.

As a game designer, I can tell you first and foremost that one of the central axioms of the universe is, "you get what you reward." If your rewards are tied to gambling predictability, you get more gambling predictability. The entire award architecture underlying the Steem blockchain would have to be changed, and at that point you don't have a blockchain.

Downvotes are a minor part of that. Again, the problem is that voting in either direction is essentially affecting the ante of your bet. Downvotes are anti-bets. They don't actually signify that you dislike content, as you can see referenced at multiple points and in common understanding, all they do is exert pressure scaled with your Steem Power on that betting pool.

Potential investors don't care about upvotes and downvotes. But more importantly, we shouldn't care about potential investors. Investors want to put their money in something that makes money and returns money to them. They want to put their money into a thing that works for the primary function that it has been pitched for. First and foremost. If it's working and turning a profit, and there getting a cut of the profit, that's all they want.

But first it has to work.

Caring about investors won't make it work.

And that's the problem.

At this point, the Steem blockchain and the interfaces available to it don't even serve as a decent, stable, decentralized blogging platform. Forget social media network; just targeting being an effective blogging platform is one of the lowest possible rungs to hit. It doesn't even do that well, especially in light of established competition like Medium, which provides a more pleasant editing interface, a better reading interface, and even better discovery.

If one is not a cryptocultist, what is the motivation for using the Steem blockchain? What is the use case? How is it even better than Reddit, which is and was a better designed for social media communication than the Steem blockchain?

Those are the questions which are going to plague the place until it burns down.

Would I like to see the Steem blockchain become a place where creators actually feel valued and people actually go to find content that there actually interested in? Sure.

Is it likely to happen? Not a chance in Hell.

Until and unless someone gets serious about thinking about the fact that users are supposed to be doing something on this platform and getting some value out of it by their interaction and not just playing a betting game, no good shall come of it. Nothing on the roadmap or in the recent development discussions have given me the feeling that anyone involved is really interested in that kind of thinking.

Again, it's a harsh world.