No, it is the point. This is my understanding of how Steemit is supposed to work.
My sincere congratulations to the remarkable rewards that you achieved with that post despite the downvote. This should really motivate you to keep posting your content.

I've come to the conclusion that the community doesn't know what it wants. And, honestly, I don't think we'll ever find out what it wants until the community is given polls to vote on topics. Ultimately, since this is a social network (not a goverment, not a country, but a business), it's not up to the community - at this point anyway - to make the rules. There will NEVER be activity that 100% of people in any community will agree on, this being one of those things. With the way things are currently setup, we can either take the bad WITH the good, or we can waste energy protesting KNOWING nothing will get done because making someone vocally justify their vote is not a priority in the eyes of the developers.

Most of the time people do not say why they like a photo, and I do not hear people complain about that. I would not take it personal, I don't think he is out to get anyone he simply did not appreciate the photo as much as others do. I think that is why Facebook only allows likes, since its hard for people to deal with alternate or negative feedback. $20+ is really good, nice Job

I personally didn't enjoy looking at your photo, there is nothing more to it. 

Consider this; of the 30 peoples who had seen your picture at the time it was about to make  40$ how many would have paid on average $1.25 of their own personal money to you for a picture?

I don't think you understand that part of the value that you have left for this post was paid by me when I purchased hundreds of thousand dollars worth of Steem.

The conflict stem from the fact that robots and people with little long term stake/ vision in the platform are making decisions with other people's stake (Guilds using Blocktrade / Ned) by upvoting way to many post than there are real people with stake able/willing to consume.

For this post to have deserved it's fair share of money people outside of steemit.com would have had to visit your post, learn about steem, understand the long-term potential of steemit and buy higher amount on average than 40$ of steem that you were going to receive. One reason for people to buy steem is to promote their content over yours, indirectly reducing your payout. It actually cost me money to exercise that downvote, I choose to do that instead of promoting my content to promote steem/steemit.com itself by incentivising content that I believe will attract people from outsite of steemit.

Thanks for the idea for next time. lol

Okay, so out of the 2 of us, I feel this is a constructive conversation at least. Maybe I'm alone in that? I don't know. 
My intent is to provide you with my viewpoint, which I've done at great effort and length (should I get a reward? LOL).

It does indeed take some time to get used to. And there are still bugs etc of course.