One of the great challenges of (effective) peer-curated content is also about being able to discern the difference between "of value to the greater community" and "I personally disagree with this."
If I can't stand rats, and someone creates a brilliant illustrated essay on the miraculous beings that rats are... do I downvote it for being disgusted and not liking it, or upvote it for being really good content about something I can't stand? Curation is not always as simple as it seems...
The whole "downvoting on the grounds of excess rewards" remains a really weird fish for me to understand. The first thing that comes to mind is whether I-- by the same token-- get to pitch a fit when my piece I worked hard on for three hours is earning $0.00 after 12 hours? Obviously I can, but it's a pretty meaningless exercise.
Don't have any easy answers, though... although I'd submit that IF there's to be downvoting based on excess rewards, it should be both contextual and on a case-by-case basis. If someone works really hard and gets minimal rewards... and then finally publishes something that "takes off," only to have rewards chopped... that's pretty discouraging. On the other hand, someone who seems constantly able to sit at the top of "featured" without creating solid content might need to be reviewed.
I think one of @krnel's arguments is that if there is a TOO MUCH then let's define that. So that it is not okay for one guy to make $150 as long as he is writing about sports, and not okay for the guy writing about FISH EYEBALLS to make $10.
If we are going to call something TOO MUCH then perhaps that should be defined rather than arbitrary.
In talking to people that do down vote for this reason they usually cannot explain what TOO MUCH is. Really it came down to something about the topic, the person, who voted on the person, etc they don't like. That seems to be the common denominator for some of them (not all).
Like trends where if @dan voted on something they would Down Vote it and state it was due to being overrewarded even if @dan's vote was small.
I argue against this behavior, and it has never personally happen to me.
I've seen it hurt other people psychologically. I've seen them think the community didn't like them and that maybe they were not doing as good as they thought they should. I've seen people leave. I've seen negative PR from it outside of steemit.
All of these seem like very bad costs if the supposed reason is to protect the reward pool. There has also been quite a bit of hypocrisy from some of the people claiming to be protecting the reward pool.
One of them would down vote people they didn't like with reward pool as an excuse only to be caught up voting their own comments to $8+ in multiple cases.
Ultimately though my interest is growing the platform. If we can avoid negative PR by simply approaching things different then I don't know why we wouldn't try that.
We should be focused on long term goals rather than letting short term reward pool policing hurt those long term goals. They may work out great for the day in question, but long term results of negative PR could make any monetary value you saved from that policing be dwarfed by the long term loss.