A good decision.
Downvotes are always personal and need strong justification.
Its a well known phenomena in economics that losing money you thought you had is far more painful than not getting the money in the first place. The "its just adjusting the reward pool" argument, while true, ignores human psychology.
Community based downvotes (where you are using delegated HP) should only be used in extreme circumstances to counter obvious abuse for which 99% of Hiveans would agree.
Hivewatchers have lost the plot and chased away many good content producers with their overly aggressive definitions of abuse, lack of transparency, failure to take reasonable criticism onboard and general Star Chamber approach to justice.
I disagree with most of that, except the psychology aspect, which ultimately led to this decision.
With us gone, hivewatchers is the only one left preventing rampant abuse like in the old days. Everyone seems to have gotten really complacent, few remember what was going on before our efforts. But we'll see where it goes.