I think downvotes have their place. In fact, I think they're not used nearly enough. With that said, I wish people would be careful when using them because you're right, a $20 downvote stirs up more negative emotions than does a $200 upvote stirs up positive emotions. Flags hurt a lot (especially when undeserved) and one big downvote can make a person want to stop posting. I've seen it happen first hand.
But, if someone is calling people names or abusing the system, they deserve to be flagged. If they decide to stop posting or sell their Steem, so be it. We don't want them here.
Steemit Inc is delegating millions of Steem power to a project that systematically downvotes mostly new authors trying to get started on Steem while failing to downvote any of the most obvious abuses.
I think this is a very unfair way to talk about @steemcleaners. You make it sound like they're out to downvote new authors just because they're posting low-quality stuff. They don't downvote because of low-quality. @steemcleaners are working their tails off to fight plagiarism, spam, and abuse. That stuff doesn't have a place here on Steem.
I agree with you that they let some of the most obvious forms of abuse slide. With that said, they're in a tough position. They're not here to be the judge of what's good and bad content. Sure, they probably think @haijin is the biggest abuser on the platform but is it their place to decide that? I'm not sure. It's a slippery slope and there's a lot of subjectivity that goes into making decisions like that.
This whole letting abuse slide thing was especially true in the earlier (pre-jerrybanfield) days of Steem. If you found a minnow posting an obviously-plagiarized post, they'd get flagged. But if the same thing was done by a Steem witness/whale/friend of a whale, @steemcleaners wouldn't do anything.
I happen to like what Steemcleaners do and fully support them and any witness that I see that are doing their best to support them as well.
If not for Steemcleaners we would have so much spam and plagiarized content out there and they would be just abuse things and just keep sending their SBD and Steem out and hardly investing time or effort.