Thank you for voicing this here, @jsteck. As you know, I've been thinking about this the same way: up and down votes as setting value and not to be taken at all personally.
There are articles I've read here that I wouldn't downvote at any price. Other times, a good posts's overwhelming success creates an wave of copy-cat posts of varying quality that trend due to speculative voting on the topic. To me, that seems to disincentivize exactly the type of behavior that will add value while rewarding a game-the-system attitude. Maybe that's for whales to handle or a downvote isn't the solution for some other reason.
But, couldn't it simply be understood that downvotes have nothing to do with who wrote it or what it's about? Couldn't we educate ourselves to expect a rise and fall of post value with no cause to be butt-hurt?
I know I'm a dreamer...
Then I'm a dreamer too. I think that first we need to make a leap of faith and arrange the system the way we want it to be in our dreams and only when this proves to be an illusion (because of the flaws of human nature) we can reconsider and possibly go back to what we have now.
But let's not throw away a possibly valuable idea just because of our fears. It's our dreams that should drive our actions, not fears.