I am not burning bridges and I generally like all the witnesses and appreciate that Steemit INC actually made a good product. But since Dan left a lot of things went awry. I wish things would get better, and we have seen some changes in the leadership recently so maybe things will turn around.
I write comments and articles because I want them to do better. A censorship resistant social media is awesome.
If there are problems with my suggestions I am all ears.
I think a 50% curation reward will just bring in more people looking to get rich who don't get about the ecosystem and culture of Steem. currently 75/25 rewards gets an 15% to maybe 21% APR. 50/50 could get you as high as 50%(depending on when you vote and if you are one of the first voters you earn more).
In such a system where someone could buy 200k USD of Steem and blindly upvote anything and everything, they would earn potentially 72k USD a year at current prices. Thats enough money to quit your job and just run an upvote bot that upvotes. I don't want to see Steem become more of a place where people are buying Steem just to upvote and make money without providing content/culture/purpose/etc.
Something as an alternative to free downvotes is to establish a downvote council similar to how we have Witnesses. Everyone votes for a Witness and Witnesses can be kicked out by losing SP that backs them. Such a thing would be great for voting on a Downvoter Council.
The Downvoter Council or maybe call them "mods" or something, would be the ones with the free downvotes. So lets say someone has 250k SP of backing for this role, that would give them X amount of free downvotes. Your free downvotes are deteremind by who backs you similar to how high ranked you are as a witness.
That would be a far better way of doing it because those people are held accountable. If a Downvote Council member starts downvoting stuff in an abusive way they could lose the SP backing them, whereas giving everyone free downvotes just gives everyone more downvotes without any structure/thought/purpose.