Love this. I don't think gamifying necessary either. Posts that recent decent auto-upvotes are less attractive to manual curators as well. So that's not good for posts that are quality. I like making down-votes blind for the exact reasons you mention as well.
Well thought out since blocktrades post about this issue.
Thanks! I think sometimes we are so into solving the problem, we forget why the problem is there in the first place and eliminate the need to solve it in the first place :)