I feel we've fallen into the trap of narcissism of small differences.

I did concede that in practice this is less likely later in my comment which you covered in your first two paragraphs above. Whatever differences of opinion we have regarding downvotes are relatively academic and negligible in practice. I support X% free downvotes.

The conversation in chat with the group was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not too constructive. Right now we have an economic system that rewards content indifferent behavior 4x more than voting behavior that's beneficial for the platform. Maybe adopting 2/3 of our measures is sufficient to turn this around if superlinear is out of the question.

Ideally I think it's better to have a system that still leaves enough to incentivize authors and I think something similar to our proposal can get us there. Failing that, 100% curation which you proposed or no inflation rewards other than paying witnesses (they're similar in some ways, obviously not identical) might be entertained. This basically will be like reddit, where there's no rewards so no incentive to act dishonestly, but with a crypto wallet attached. I think this isn't great but it could work.

I'm reluctant to try this path without at least a serous attempt at making this place work as it was initially intended. I don't consider hyperinflation, n^2, 25% curation, linear very serious attempts. But of course, it's not up to me, thanks for your time.