Unfortunately I don't agree on many things you have written above. A few important points you missed:
hive.blog and ecency have always shown downvotes at the bottom of the vote list. Nobody ever complained. Now we are doing the same on peakd if and only if downvotes are very small.
free speech is a thing, but spam is different. If an account downvote every single post it's not free speech. It's spam. And in my opinion hiding spam is a good thing.
those very small downvotes get lot of attention on the UI for a very wrong reason. Basically those accounts get attention because people are curious to know why that icon is displayed. And because on every single post there are 3 automatic account that cast those votes.
You explained in the comments that those accounts "are an initiative to make countering whale votes easier, both up and down.".
Well, seems to me you agree with me. We should hide those automatic downvotes that are only a trigger and only show larger ones if someone decide to follow them on hive.vote.Those downvotes are not permanently hidden or deleted, just moved into another place. Like comments automatically muted for accounts with negative reputation.
I spent last night working with the new design.
It is a good one.
I was wrong.
I was afraid that more steps were to be required, ie, going to hiveblocks, but it seems you have not hidden the votes, just changed where they were linked.
You have done a good job with this change.
This I do not agree with.
I think there should be more crab bucket action so that the top 20 accounts no longer control 50% of the rewards pool.
I found that we cannot follow these trails on hive.vote because they don't have 1000hp.
So, unless the person creating that initiative can overcome that obstacle, they are pointless.
hive.blog didn't show the downvotes at the end of the list. It shows them based on the value of the votes. So if there is a $1 vote and a -$1.1 downvote, the downvote is displayed above the upvote. It lists them based on their impact.
At least this is how it used to be. Not sure if it changed.