well can't say i fully agree there at the end, author rewards shouldn't really be seen as income, I think curation rewards are more guaranteed that way.
I do however agree that people shouldn't be downvoting for disagreements and other petty things, I don't downvote lightly personally. That user you may be referring to telling me I'm plagiarising pokemon (if that's the case I'm thinking of) has had a larger history of some suspicious activities, furthermore inciting that I'm out here to harm other hive games when I have a long history of buying tokens, assets and actively using many games I can stay focused on. Some people get really weird when their potential income/profits get put at risk and they may look for others to blame for when things go sideways, think that was the case there.
I'm not saying people can't consistently earn here and not sure why you haven't/aren't, maybe look into different communities to post in or something, not sure. My point is that you shouldn't think of author rewards as something that can stay guaranteed forever, autovotes can go away at random, supporters can unstake their hive power, random downvotes can fly for dumb reasons. We're still so small that there's not always eyes in the right places to stand up for bad activity such as bad downvotes for instance. We're still kind of allowing vote buying through delegations and stuff even though it's the one thing that takes away value from everyone. We got a lot of room for improvement.