Thanks for the feedback! I actually think that most of the downvotes are well-intentioned. To me, the problem is mostly in the way people perceive them. We can tell people not to take it personally until we're blue in the face, but it still feels personal to most people.
The other side to that, though, is that there needs to be some other incentive (like a second price auction style of mechanism) penalizing people for overvaluing a post and encouraging people to vote honestly. IMO, the last two years proved that you can't just disable downvotes - without any other changes - and expect that posts are going to be ranked in any sort of rational manner.
Yeah, I don't know the history, but I don't see anything in your comments on this post that deserved to be downvoted, so I can't explain it. That also falls under the honest voting heading. IMO, over-rewarding and over-penalizing are both big problems for the health of the blockchain and for the overall satisfaction level for participants. I think that over-penalizing might be the worse of the two.
I agree with a lot of what you say here, especially the advocacy for non-blogging uses for the blockchain.
but I also like the idea of stake-weighted voting, and I wouldn't support removing downvotes without putting some other mechanism in place to disincentivize every voter from just blindly maxing out their own rewards.
I'm hoping that as Steem-engine and SMT tokens evolve, they'll make room for all sorts of experimentation with rules and incentives in order to discover all the different use cases, and also drive improvements in the quality of people's voting.