What are your views on downvotes. More specifically, do you think casting a down vote as a witness on large quality content creators content that cross promotes to hive discourages growth by giving said content creator the appearance that an official hive rep disapproves of said content?

My view is that every stakeholder can use their stake however they want. Consensus on rewards is based on all the upvotes and downvotes that a post receives from all the participating stakeholders. If a stakeholder wants to use their stake to downvote content they do not believe should be getting rewarded, that is 100% within their right.

Do you think Hive.io is still worth developing further? Can we call it beta still or is this a finished product?

I don't use Hive.io, so I don't really have an opinion on that. I use peakd.com.