The best I can do is explain what the changes are and what our desired (and hopefully expected) results will be.

You are doing that very well. And in addition you listen and answer to the people who are commenting your article.

Last thing (for now): what do you think about retaliation flags?

For example the comment directly on top under your article - I guess normally you would flag it: a self-upvoted, insulting comment, but you know very well what would happen then ... and if in future downvotes will be really cheap (or better to say: give you some rewards), what do you think some whales are going to do then? :)

I think there should be an elected committee with lots of delegated SP (for example from Steemit, Inc.) to be able to discuss, decide about and counter abusive whale flags if necessary. Only then a downvote pool made sense in my opinion.

I don't intend to criticize anybody, but just would like to give some input and hope some of these ideas may become object of witness discussions in future.