I think the downvote is incredibly important to maintain the quality of the content. If you hang out in the Steemit Slack, you'll see constant activity in the #steemitabuse channel. People are working hard to protect this community from those trying to game the system. A downvote is needed for that.
As for not getting goose poo... how much has Twitter or Facebook ever paid out to content creators and curators? A few pennies is more than the other sites have given out even after years of creating content. People around here have $$$ in their eyes a little too much for my taste. It manipulates their expectations which, as you said, leads to disappointment. That, to me, is a problem with their expectations more than anything else. This is beta. It's an incredible experiment. We don't know what it will be so most expectations are just wild-ass guesses.
I'll be writing a post about the $$$-eyes problem shortly (trying to get some "real" work done for a change first).
Fuck yes; well said.
I ended up writing that post after all, if you're interested. A bit of CSS added to your browser's view of Steemit via the Stylish extension hides all $ signs. I'm running an experiment on myself to hide them all for 24 hours. So far, it's changed my voting quite a bit.