Also you hope that since everyone will be granted equal rights, other people will not go off the rails imprisoning everyone.

All I hope for is that reasonable behavior (i.e. not going off the rails) will statistically prevail. I suggest to at least give it a try and revert if we conclude that it causes more harm than good.

I totally agree with you that Steemit would benefit from a proper downvote option, simply because negative feedback is productive, awakening and valuable.

Tools for giving feedback to the author are these: the upvotes, the comments and the flag. The downvote option is supposed to be give feedback not to the author but only to those who have upvoted: "Hey guys, we've spent too much of our limited funds on this single post or comment".