With the downvote bit, from my point of view and experience, people weren't using the downvotes either because they didn't want to out of fear of retaliation, didn't understand fully what it actually meant (I.e. Not logically thinking that the vote buttons are an indicator of where you want rewards to go) or just wanted to focus on the positive aspect of it - assuming everyone I'm referring to is a genuine person (not taking in to account vote trading and other shady stuff).
I don't think the average user appreciated what having a couple of free dv per day means and it's a vital balancing act if used properly.
I don't know enough about the ins and outs of SBD but I see SBD as probably being pivotal when trading all the new SMTs that are due to come out. Having a stable price for SBD would make the most sense and then STEEM becomes the resource credit to use your account or create accounts with (more like for account functionality and bandwidth) or using non-smt like the steem engine tokens (not sure about this bit though).
I made sure I didn't press "reply" before saying anything this time! Funny how the phone screen becomes most sensitive when you don't want it to, yet wrecks me when it comes to autocorrect lol