Of course content quality plays a role - and if curangel and its trail had the power to bring this post to an extremely low level, I would have added something to the queue myself or asked someone else to put something to not hit it too hard. It doesn't though, it received a 100% downvote (I think the first ever in the short history of curangel, because there haven't been many submissions that round), and it still has a reward considerably higher than the big majority of content. We're not big enough to even counter all of the votes of the circle on one post, and he gets a lot of votes from outside of it on top of that.

The whitepaper speaks of colluding groups to be countered by downvotes, so I strongly disagree, there's nothing wrong with working together when doing that. We group up for the downvotes as a reaction, because as individuals we're too weak (SP) and vulnerable (retaliation). We don't complain, we act. As soon as they break up their groups, we're happy to put all our focus on positive things again. This is not fun for anyone ;D