I don't have much to add to the rest of your comment but I'd like to say something about this.

If someone is helping fix my problem, someone else down the line is earning less. That's not cool.

Downvoting power is limited, too, and once it's been used up, downvoting will begin to eat into the downvoter's upvoting power. How all votes are distributed is never one user's problem. Everything affects everyone. If you get hit by downvotes that are clearly unreasonable and have nothing to do with the quality of the content being downvoted, that's everyone's issue because it sends rewards that should land on good content back to the pool from which curators will have to allocate them again. Abusive downvoting wastes every curator's time.