Reasons as if the content of that "stuff" has not been seen by anyone or only seen by a minimal audience
That's extremely unlikely for anything with large payout.
I really don't know what do you refer to or what do you want to mean with that of "they have to choose what to downvote."
It's really very simple. People have only a limited number of downvotes and most don't even use all of those. Only a VERY, VERY small amount of content ever gets downvoted. For some reason you are fixated on that and ignoring the large majority that does not get downvoted, and therefore in effect gets a nod from the stakeholder base because for whatever reason no one objects to it.
I've said in this comment. Define me now what the hell are extreme cases?
Extreme cases are the very, very largest stakeholders with a few percent of the stake (I'm one of the largest and I have a little over 1%). But with downvotes you only get 25% vote power, so someone with 1% of the stake can only downvote 0.25% of the upvotes.
The majority of stuff can't be downvoted heavily, and in practice it's far more than that (90-95%+ that is NOT downvoted). People have to choose. When they choose something to downvote, that is a VERY strong indication of disagreement. You don't have to agree there should be disagrement, but recognize it for what it is.