Not only do you lose the curation returns from the vote you removed (and voting power) but the next vote won't give you any returns either (it all goes to the other voters on that post). Something already in talks to fix as many can't really recall what the purpose of it was to work this way to begin with, most likely anti-botting during the front-run reward era.
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Fair enough, I do recall now from learning about this on Steem - I presumed it had something to do with putting people off of upvoting to get reach and then unvoting to use that reach somewhere else. Otherwise a post could be upvoted to the top spot, get a bunch of votes due to the exposure, then be unvoted and rinse-repeat - the same vote power boosts up a load of posts without ever actually being intended to result in a reward payout from the upvoter's own HP/stake.
Yeah, that could be one thing, another could be if it were to return you voting power as well when you unvote, then those wanting to maximize would spam vote on each post, then unvote if it didn't get other voters on top when the curve wasn't linear and rewarded front-runners.
Yes, it's not perfect, but on balance not returning the vote power when a vote is cancelled is probably a good idea.