First of all I want to say that I am very glad for the work being done by @kevinwong and @trafalgar to enable participation on the current Steem economics, while also pushing solutions forward. I very well agree with most of the points brought up here. The increase in curation rewards and downvotes incentives are particularly significant, as we tried several attempts to overcome those in our product development. The lack of proper curation incentives drove us to tricky implementations which we had to tweak continuously in the way we reward our curators/moderators. The lack of downvotes incentives made us think of complete different ways to sort our contents, compared to what the blockchain can offer. Built-in solutions, like the ones aligned here, are ideal and could lower the hassle significantly.

I am collecting inputs, like this one, trying to have an overview of the hottest community requirements. Utopian supports the maintenance of Steem forks (see @reggaemuffin ' s one) which enable proposals and testing of disruptive changes. It makes sense to bring such inputs in the right places (github issues) and incentivise the development, via community participation.