"Costs you money" implies money is yours or owed to you in some way. It costs you opportunity cost, for sure. No one is denying that. Please reference the Github issues I mentioned in my post which are attempts to change that.

People are free to do what they want with their stake, even if it means demonstrating the Steem blockchain is short-sighted, the rewards system can not curate valuable content via Proof of Brain, and (if we continue with this thought experiment) investors should sell and move to other projects (which destroys the value for everyone). I personally prefer a different path forward. We all have a financial incentive to make Steem work and that includes protecting the value of the rewards pool as a shared collaborative commons. If we don't use the tools at our disposal to do that (including downvotes), then we'll get what we deserve and other projects will be more successful.