...without fear of being silently down-voted....

Did I silently downvote you? No. I honored your request -- I stated that I downvoted you. I even did more than you asked by stating why.

Such punitive voting against ideas rather than for a misdeed....

Complaining about being downvoted is often considered a misdeed here, so by your own standards, you qualify for being downvoted!

Regardless, if I think something is a bad idea why shouldn't I vote it down? Enlightenment is attained by learning from and then discarding bad ideas (among other things), and voting on nodes helps establish if something is a good idea or not. It's just like taking an informal survey: "Is this idea good or bad?".

And as a side note, if you are going to suggest a radical change like yours you should really put a lot more effort into the post. A lengthy, well thought out essay about it may have gone over much better and many people who did not like the idea may have still upvoted it and then discussed the problems with it. Throwing out such ideas so haphazardly as you did (another misdeed) is practically guaranteed to get you a lot of downvotes.

As a side note, I commend you for continuing to post as yourself and taking the downvote hit.

Emphasis in bold added in above quotes.

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