I commend the benevolent whales who want to fix these issues but I think the issue of curation is fundamentally broken because of user interface problems which is also part of the reason the downvote pool will not work as some hope.

You are right on that part of the interface problems even to downvote someone outside the official steemit webpage. For example, I use partiko and busy.org and they only offer the upvote.

So since the interface is not synced​ across different services people that use other apps to post on steemit will not even have that functionality. And I have reasons to believe they will not go to the official page just to downvote something on purpose.