From what I've seen, things are much better in that respect nowadays, but I suppose there will always be such people. So the best thing to do is try to define a set of blockchain rules that limit such abuses as much as possible.

> ...are more fixated on getting ahead themselves relative to others.

I'm pretty sure the "human-contentment and empathy" problem is not unique to this particular case.

Even most "charitable organizations" only use 11% of their donations to "help" anyone.

The other 89% they keep for themselves, and that ends up being a pretty effective business model, especially when you can get FREE LABOR from naive VOLUNTEERS.

It favors downvotes over upvotes, which I presume is what you mean by it attacks the power balance (i.e. it changes the power balance between upvotes and downvotes). 

But I think this is a good change in that balance, because payouts to a post are "irreversible". Whereas if a post gets downvoted in a way that other stakeholders feel is unfair, a followup post can be made and stakeholders have a further chance to adjust the payout to the author "after the fact".  In fact, we've seen this done before many times in the past, when the community decided that a downvoter was acting unfairly.

On the other hand, there's no way to reverse a payment once it's made,  so last minute voting that results in a post payout that most people disagree with, can't be adjusted.

As a side note, downvoting doesn't decrease the amount of rewards paid out by Hive, it only distributes those rewards away from the downvoted post to other active posts and comments. I think this is worth mentioning, since I'm not sure how many people know this.