It may sound wise to a few devs or whales here but on the ground this newly added downvote tool has literally chased many away, despite all the pre-knowledge about how it would probably chase people, so the overall result is bad, not good, regardless of what the logic and wisdom was. The theory was one thing but the result was a bad outcome so statistically it was a failure and did the opposite of what we are all trying to achieve. We shot ourselves in the foot and will never heal as long as the thorn of downvote remains.