"The dream when we started out was to change culture around downvotes."
An inherent misapprehension has caused DV misuse to do great harm to Hive, because the opposite of an upvote is not a downvote, but no vote. The opposite of curating content is not curating it. A downvote is comparable to a tax, a punitive tax that facilitates censorship of objectionable content, such as spam, scams, and plagiarism, but due to it's misapprehension as the opposite of an upvote has caused ~1m users that tried the platform since 2017 to abandon it when they were afflicted with censorial taxation through opinion flagging, still regularly practiced by HW with predictable results.
Strictly limiting downvotes to preventing such abuses as you point out in the OP would not be controversial, but that has proved impossible against a variety of cunning justifications of downvotes that have been employed for pecuniary, political, and personal reasons by disingenuous stakeholders less interested in Hive's success than their own aggrandizement and interests. I just recently learned of ongoing vote selling openly onchain by guruasia which I doubt could exist without collusion with HW and similar entities. Plutocracies will never avoid control by the most acquisitive, and thus least ethical, stakeholders, and this renders Hive incapable of overcoming immense pools of capital other than by being an unattractive investment, that necessarily requires it's governance to prevent growth and appreciation to discourage capture, as Steem proved.
Larry Fink (and thousands of others) could snap up every Hive token with pocket lint, and Hive will not overcome that vulnerability as long as raw stake controls governance. However, for substantial Hive stakeholders such conquest ruining the Hive platform is a golden parachute, a consolation prize for ending their profiteering via curation rewards.
Until Hive effects a governance mechanism that prevents raw stake from controlling it's code, we can expect Hive to continue to hemorrhage users in order to discourage it's capture, at least until it's ability to facilitate free speech necessitates nominal expenditures by malevolent stakeholders to eliminate that irritant, which becomes more likely daily as such losses are increasingly absorbed by commercial entities to censor and indoctrinate their markets. Given the financial incentives to the extant stakeholders to maintain their ROI, why would they ever even consider such a thing, when the most likely result if they do nothing is they get to retire wealthy?
I regard this 'cease fire' as encouraging, and hope it portends better application of mechanisms to benefit Hive's users improved understanding will facilitate going forward.
Thanks!