Been a bit thin around here, doing the "Christmas thing" so I'll just start with saying Merry Christmas, and hope you had a good one!
I'll get back to something I have soapboxed on in the past — and which is likely unchangeable, at this point — which is that we have built a de-facto community culture based on the notion that we are somehow entitled to a chunk of the rewards pool, rather than viewing it as a bonus for sharing worthy content.
To me, rewards on Hive remains a bit little tipping at a restaurant (at least here in the US!) where what you end up with is closely linked to what you provide... but you're not entitled to a good tip, and you're certainly not entitled to a $20 tip for handing someone a cup of coffee!
The only times I can recall (and this was a long time ago, on the old chain) downvotes feeling like an attack was when I got inadvertently caught in the crossfire of several whales having interpersonal squabbles... as in
"Whale A is in a fight with Whale B and goes around and DOWNvotes everything Whale B UPvotes, and then puts innocent bystanders on permanent downvote lists by association."
While we're all free to do what we want, that reeks of junior high school bully antics or dictatorial Sub-Redditors shadowbanning someone because of who's on their friends list.
But it's pretty rare.
Since Hive is a continuously eveolving ecosystem, I'm hoping someone further fleshes out the K-E to include &(at least for curation purposes) some kind multiplier/divisor that takes into account the quality (or not) of contributions each content creator adds.
It's not impossible. I don't know if you were part of them, but if we go back to Asher's (@abh12345) old "Curation and Engagement Leagues" — which were remarkably successful in helping support genuine quality on Hive, and previously Steemit — he developed a fairly elaborate algorithm that ranked content on quality, one-word comments quite differently from paragraph long comments, caught repetition and plagiarism, self-voting and more... if that somehow could be integrated with K-E, it might give a more meaningful picture of relative value.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't think it's downvotes that are bad for Hive, it's our non-stop bickering over them that's an issue.