Yes I have argued exactly the same logic repeatedly, couldn't agree more:

While downvoting is perceived as a flag and rightly so as it is refereed to by the system as such, and constantly refereed by the community as downvote, it will garner all the negative attention associated to flagging, and act as a confusion and misunderstanding primer. It's kinda a flag but it acts as a downvote with the power to also hide content, not just decrease rewards based on VP and SP. Downvote and flagging should be two different systems, flagging is for abuse and flag abuse, and that should be equal in power across the board, and the current flagging should just share a place next to the upvote as a downvote and it should be much more draining on voting power, as a means to balance it out and de-incentivize abuse and then remove it's ability to hide posts and give the new flagging function that ability and also to negatively affect the reputation, as well as allow for flags themselves to be flagged, and if there is a consensus of 2 or more affect the reputation of the flagger, as to stop sybil attacks with flags peg the flagging ability to a good reputation score that can be achieved by new users, maybe 50ish.

On the flatter reward curve voting test thread by clayop

Btw if my comments are automatically flagged it's because @fyrstikken, he is flagging me after I pointed out his immoral behavior in a thread dedicated to him. I asked him very pertinent questions about supporting anonymous blackmail and voting purely for gestural reasons and to antagonize people by voting two opposing views with those votes worth 0.03%. He has lied about that and only recently in that post has admitted to voting like that while before he said he votes automatically with 1% and now just like before he deflected answering for those purely gestural votes, this time lying and saying he was out of voting power when in fact during those days he voted like that he barely voted compared to later times. Now after admitting he votes like that he started to slander me and attack my character and never answered as to why he support whoever runs blacklist and their extortion and flag attacks without reason or justification for the flags. He closed as you will see, by attempting to appear like he was open to discussion and even saying that he doesn't care about me slandering him, which I have not as I simply stated the truth/facts, but then when he came back all he did was flag my comments and post that had nothing to do with him. He doesn't seem to want to talk and has resorted to only attacking my character/petty name calling.

Before this I had a good suspicions that he is not only running the anonymous blackmail/extortion racket of blacklist but also runs iflagtrash because in a previous encounter where I asked him about the voting behavior the bot iflagtrash turned on right after I was literally egged him on to turn on the bot because nothing was going to stop my inquiry, and I believe my suspicions were warranted because of his post about anonymity at the time that iflagtrash was founded/created/activated along with his blatant support for blacklist and their 40 steem pay up extortion to be removed form their list, whoever they are, and that only made me more determined to pursue that even more. His troll behavior is now only showing even more, and so until he is either open to discussing it and/or more people start to recognize and question his actions, I will simply continue to point out that his behavior is not only disingenuous, but abusive and detrimental to the community.

This is the thread/post I was referring to link, and if you want I'll be more than happy to link you the previous one where I suspected him for running iflagtrash and blacklist.