(Disclaimer: Everything said below is only my personal opinion)
I support elimination of curation rewards idea - curation rewards add too much of complexity that outweighs all the benefits they provide.
In regard of 250 MV voting threshold, I think it needs some further development - in current form it doesn't solve original problem (influence doesn't scale well with the number of users), and it also adds a lot of complexity (that I see as another big issue right now), e.g. now you need to counterbalance whales' initiatives to not make them to split their accounts into multiple 250MV pieces and regain their influence back, giving them some passive income might be not enough or giving too much can counteract the decentralization of the stake.
"canceling out the downvotes" - it would be nice to enable this for all users, or even better - turn all upvotes or dowvotes into analogy of comments that would be votable too, so upvotes or downvotes on them would affect their strength.
RE: Whales - Can the community buy out a portion of your influence?