I think I've read all of your replies here. I share some of your concerns but not all of your conclusions

Firstly I want to clearly spell out the problem: Under our current economy of linear and 25% curation, it is roughly 4x more financially rewarding to participate in content indifferent voting behavior than content reflective voting behavior. This has lead to a complete failure in our ability to function as a content discovery and rewards platform.

The solution therefore is as follows: We need to introduce a new economic scheme that incentivizes content reflective voting by rewarding it at least as much as content indifferent voting.

Higher curation seems like it'll at least be part of the solution. Note that curation % is sort of a soft parameter because the market itself can in many ways circumvent it and set their own curation %. For example, you can view bid bots as offering 80-110% to sellers, undercutting the 25% we've set. That being said, I don't know if there are market incentives to negotiate a lower curation % than the official one (I need more thought here)

Having said that, 50% curation is probably insufficient by itself to compete platform wide against vote farming. Much higher and we risk removing too much financial incentive for content creators. I know there are arguments suggesting we can try curation as high as 100% but lets try leaving a healthy dose to content creators for now and see if we can make up the other 30-50% by other means. I do however view curation as a 'cost' because the $ that finds its way back to the voter is a pointless use of inflation in and of itself. It's the competition of this money that will bring value, and for that to happen it has to be significant, which is why we propose 50%.

I share your concern about downvoting, far more than smooth and a lot of others. However toxic it has been in the past, with something like 10% free downvotes, it will be a lot worse. There are some larger stakeholders here who are somewhat pre disposed to what I would consider needlessly adversarial behavior, and at times with much smaller steemians. However suffocating it must feel for them to be on the wrong end of a downvote chokehold for sometimes weeks on end, it will likely be much more painful. We're all human, this place can take a mental toll on me even if downvotes are financially negligible, maybe you can relate, so I can imagine what it's like to be a smaller account getting pinned down without reprieve. However, even knowing all this I still relunctantly support something like 10% free/separate downvotes. As we remove the lost opportunity cost to casting a downvote, I'd imagine most downvotes would be exercised in good faith. We need an extra force to bring down the rewards of vote farming so that 50% curation rewards can be the most competitive form of returns. Only then can our platform succeed.

This leaves superlinear. I understand the inequality that comes with superlinear, nevertheless I'm surprised at the resistance this is getting compared to greater downvote incentives. I would strongly wager that at the ground level, the detriments of downvotes outlined above would be felt far harder than the inequality of something like n^1.2-1.3.

But why have them at all? Well there are many benefits including making it far more costly to price a vote (as value is now dependent on popularity), making it no longer profitable to micro farm spam posts (100 1% votes are way less rewarding than 1 100% vote), basically it brings all profitable behavior into the light. Notice that while 10% of downvotes are free, unlike upvotes which has curation, there is no direct economic incentive to cast them carefully and precisely. Under linear, if people decide to spam and farm comments instead of playing the game fairly, there isn't an incentive to spend the effort to track them down with your downvotes. But this is impossible with a bit of superlinear.

It basically patches up a loophole that would otherwise exist, as well as reward curation more, facilitate downvotes by drawing easy targets around abuse and makes it difficult for bid bots to accurately price votes. As for its costs, I'd say that n^1.2 is no where near as bad as n^2. The collaborative effort of large players colluding to farm mega votes is greatly disincentivzed by a much more modest curve (compared to n^2), as well as the looming threat of downvotes also being proposed. If I'm right on this, then we get to patch up our loopholes in spam farming and enjoy other benefits of superlinear at the cost of pretty modest inequality. I think it's worth it.

The changes are somewhat drastic by necessity because we're replacing a system that rewards something we don't want 4x as much as something we do. The measures all have their costs, higher curation means superficially more redundant use of inflation, more downvotes will be painful, and superlinear, however mild, is unfair to smaller players. But I'm going for the minimum amount of evil necessary to get us to a functioning content curation system.