Dan, I have concerns with your final conclusion. I am not certain if Steemit is the appropriate platform for mass education (getting subscribers to face the issue, understand it, and accept it) on this issue. Ultimately Perception tends to win the day (no matter how incorrect) , and the bigger the population the more entrenched that "perception" is. If the objective is for the smoothest path to success for the platform, I don't think that going against this perceptual titlewave will be the best way to get us there. I must admit, my understanding of what was intended regarding voting on this platform was in fact faulty, however I still maintain that avoiding down voting, if possible, would be the best path to consensus and social cohesion. I will not write more here, but will copy a response from an
earlier discussion involving voting and the flagging issue. you my find of interest.
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Hi, good comments. I also think that the dialog box is a good, or maybe even an essential component to the flagging system. It is essential because flagging is providing negative feed back. This is always touchy as misunderstandings can lead to upset between the two parties and thought of an unfair playing field. It is first essential (and sorely lacking currently) to have a clear set of rules, )a constitution if you will ) that all agree to play by. We all know that spam and plagiarism is against the social consensus. We need to expand on that list of social expectations and pin it visibly on the site. This rule book should be the bases of all flagging action noted on @bendjmiller222 's dialog box. In doing this we get clear documented expectations and clear documented violation. This way, very efficiently, one can check the " accepted rules", against the "rules" their being accused of breaking.

Regarding using flagging for down-voting, I have an idea for possibly a better way for reaching consensus that I hope will be considered.

Lately there has been a lot of down voting of top paying posts, who have no visible violation of rules of social consensus (that I can see anyway). I've seen a lot of comments about this. People are assuming the cause to be jealousy, dis-like etc. I must admin many times I am left with simular notions. Whether that be true or not, "perception is reality" as they say. I would submit the idea that negative feedback in a broad mass-communication social network is not a good thing. Negative feed back opens the social group up to the potential of a whole host of emotional driven actions that usually end up being harmful. So, Instead of ( + / - vote ) to reach consensus I would propose ( + / 0 vote ) .
"Up Vote / No Vote" - These would be the two binaries between which consensus would be achieved. Doing this we remove the emotionally charged issue of negative voting. Think of it as simular to how the Steemit system gets around the negative stigma of asking members to pay upfront for operational costs by actually acquiring its resources through inflation. The end result is the same, but the phycological negative barrier is neutralized,. In the case of counter voting (down voting) it leaves the flagging system alone to deal strictly with rule breakers and transfers the responsibility to the "up vote" algorithm

So then, how to we deal with blog awards being to high if this is in fact an issue? I am not a mathematician, but it seems the general up-vote weighing calculated by the program would need to come down. So, build the counter weight into the up vote algorithm to hide it, just like Steemit's ability to obtain resources is hidden in to the inflation.

That said, it could very well be that the voting algorithm is working just fine now, and what we are seeing in the large awards is simply the free market at work.

Thanks. Enjoyed reading your ideas.