No, we understand perfectly. You can't insist votes are a 2-way street and simultaneously say downvotes aren't punitive when they diminish rewards that were allocated to the user by other users who wanted to reward the content. Either it is a one way street and downvotes should not be used apart from flagging spam and plagiarism, or 2 way street where upvotes reward and downvotes punish by diminishing those rewards.
Taking away or diminishing a reward is very much a punitive action and would not be accomplished if the blockchain had not allocated rewards that are then being subjectively adjusted down, taken away from the user they were delegated to by upvote. Downvotes don’t allocate rewards, on the contrary they nullify to some extent what has been allocated by users on the chain, so what you really mean when you make this bs claim is that no one is entitled to rewards powerful users don’t want you to have.
More of the exact same defensive BS from the echo chamber inhabited by some of the most nefarious reward pool rapists this platform tolerates.
Users do not "allocate", they vote. The blockchain allocates at the end of seven days depending on the overall result of the voting.