Autodownvotes would definitely suck. I really hope the next hardfork will make manual curation happen a bit more (and some other plans after that which @blocktrades mentioned in a previous post of mine to maybe lower the amount of daily votes an account has to give). Too bad it's not possible to reward manual votes more than autovotes (nothing outside of captcha's or something bots couldn't perform compared to humans, but that would quickly become annoying if every vote you want to cast has to run through a captcha - especially for curation projects that vote hundreds of posts per day to share distribution wide).
Hopefully we can just improve from here on out, I do want people to get more used to downvotes existing and using them as I think with the linear curve many will attempt to bring back vote-selling or other schemes to increase their ROI like we've seen already happening that need to be nipped in the bud quick.
PeakD pools upvotes and downvotes in a single "votes" chart. Over half of my total votes seem to go to three abusive accounts I flag. I think if we promote the ownership concept of stakes vests, and encourage people to clean house as part of their activities, it might help. I liked the old Steem Flag Rewards initiative, and maybe some kind of Hive reward pool for responsible downvote curators might encourage more activity with some oversight to protect against abuse?