During the 7-day voting period, upvotes and downvotes are applied to posts in a constant tug-of-war (at least that's the way it was designed).
If that were the sole case of then there why are down voted post and comments greyed out?
When the timer ends, voila, you have consensus and payout.
So why are post greyed out prior to the end of the timer? If it is only about payout, why the greying out of content?
The down vote system has been broken since inception, if down votes were only about the pay out, then your statements would be acceptable. But down votes are not only about pay-outs. They are about plagiarism and abuse, and a couple of other things that pop up when the down vote button is clicked.
Normalizing bad behavior is a bad idea, it has always been a bad idea, and always will be a bad idea to normalize bad behavior. I have seen the results prior to HF 21/22 of down vote abuse of individuals on steemit, and of various dApps.
I down vote for one reason and one reason only and that is plagiarism. After down voting the person, I leave a comment why I down voted, I give it a few days, and then I mute that individual. Do they still stay and plagiarize? most likely, but I am not going to go out of my way to play steem sheriff. (SS).
I would look at all the greyed out comments, yes some of them were troll comments from ticked off people, a lot of them were from people who left REAL MEANINGFUL comments on post, but they were on the down vote stasi hit parade list. Abused by the so called abuse fighters. Bad behavior is bad behavior and normalizing bad behavior is wrong.
So how do we make it not be bad behavior normalization? we fix the down vote system, put a check mark next to the listed reasons for down voting, and then add an auto comment that is tied to the account of the person down voting, so that the recipient, and or community can agree or disagree by likewise down voting their down vote. Also this would make it a little bit more difficult on the bot runners that randomly down vote post for no reason other than troll type activity.
It's late for me and I did not take the time to read any other comments.
This is not a blockchain problem. You are describing problems/solutions with a particular condenser. When I used Busy, I frequently saw posts and comments that were hidden on Steemit.com. I think a better argument to make would be a configuration setting that disabled the greying out of posts/comments. @Steempeak has been very agile in adding features, and would probably add that if there was enough interest.
As I said, you can downvote based on any criteria you want. What you can't do, is dictate to other sovereign voters what their own individual criteria is. Sure, a particular condenser could force a voter into categorical downvoting if they wanted to, but I don't think that would be widely supported. I would not support that.
Your arguments seem to be an appeal for centralized governance. That kind of defeats the purpose of a blockchain. Decentralized governance can be messy at times, there's no denying that.