So what you're saying here is that any post that gets passed over by 'any and all whale DVs' has thusly received the consensus blessing of all whales and thus is allowed to bathe in the HIVE inflation reward pool.

No, non-whales can and do downvote as well, and can have a large impact on rewards especially the moderate payouts that don't have whale upvotes.

If whales upvote and bestow a large windfall on a post (in fact even a single whale can), then it's fitting that other whales can also downvote that same post, no?

This is exemplified by the situation with @themarkymark, @newsflash, and @xeldal.

The problem I have with your argument is that @newsflash (at least previously, if I understand correctly that it powered down) and @xeldal are extremely large stake accounts. They have a large, one could even say enormous (relatively speaking) investment in the chain. If, for whatever reason 'good' or 'bad', they happen not to believe that @themarkymark should receive rewards, it's pretty unlikely that @themarkymark receiving rewards could ever be said to have consensus. You can adjust things around the edges somewhat, but that fundamental fact is hard to avoid.

No protocol will be perfect. However, I am convinced that we can do better.

I don't disagree with any of that!

innumerable accounts who value marky's contributions

For what it is worth, number of accounts does not matter at all. A swarm of 10000 low stake bot accounts should have little to no influence. I prefer to speak of stake or some other demonstrably effective reputation mechanism (extremely hard), and not 'accounts'.

As I understand it, @newsflash and @xeldal targeted @themarkymark as retaliation. They decided to "go after" @themarkymark because of his voting behavior on other posts that they didn't like. This is a negative outcome whether it succeeds or not: @themarkymark, as with anyone else, should be free to express his position positive or negative on posts without fear of retaliation. The most likely solution to retaliation that I see as plausible is making votes anonymous. It's widely done in the real world in part for this reason (also because it inhibits vote buying). Technically this is difficult in a decentralized chain but certainly not impossible. It's more likely to practically achievable after moving social voting to a layer two app rather than trying to build more and more complexity into the base chain.