You can't expect an economic system of selling votes and another of honest voting for curation rewards to coexist over time

One will naturally out compete and subsume the other

Now with the new economic tools such as free downvoting, we can fight for honest voting to be the dominant form of rewards and anyone buying votes will risk getting hit hard by downvotes

If we lose this fight, then slowly they're be fewer and fewer downvotes going their way and everyone will just sell their votes for like 90% of the return of their vote value. Why settle for 50% if you can get 90% unchallenged? Then we're just down shits creek again like before.