Great questions. I actually completely forgot about blacklisting even existing on Hive until recently because I don't use it myself. I thought it might be good to give people the option to use blacklisting, but I agree that actually its probably more empowering and 'decentralised' to force users to take responsibility for their own connections. The biggest reason for me being on Hive and building Ureka is that I have seen first hand how terrible the censorship is online (most people never realise until they start going against the grain of the 'standardised society' publicly). So I strongly intend Ureka to not only overcome that but to also help evolve people's perspective on personal responsibility and free flow of information.

So, basically, I think I'll keep the blacklists disabled for now.
I'm not totally against the reputation based filtering, but I recall when I was being heavily downvoted that I was told 'there is no censorship on Hive, go build your own front end if you want real free speech' (basically words to that effect).. So I have and will experiment for now without the rep filtering. I may add it in depending on the outcomes.