Phil, I liked your post, but I empathize with the down-voters you're worried about. Why?

The real content in the OP is that you're measuring conflict in value systems, not some objective "worseness" that people know not to Platonize. This point was completely hidden to me until the 12th line where you said "This is an energy measure that we want to minimize", which is too late and too roundabout for a thesis statement.

The original summary repeated the term "worse" from the title instead of earning my trust and curiosity by telling me what the content would really be about (conflict measurement). As a result, I was very tempted to stop reading.

So suppose instead you started the summary with "We're going to measure conflict in value systems", and clarified right away what you meant by "worse" in the shortened title. Then:

1. You'd earn my trust, and initiate a new curiosity: "How's he going to measure conflict?", and

2. Your model would be more immediately intuitive: starting to read it, I'd think "Oh, of cousre he's plotting nodes and weighted edges... he wants to measure conflict," furthering my trust that the article is actually going somewhere.

From experience, I expected your post to have eventually-decipherable interesting content, so I kept reading, and turns out it did. But perhaps not everyone felt justified to do so if they didn't share that experience, and maybe they downvoted instead.

Generally speaking, if you want your ideas to reach lots of people and gain approval, you have to re-earn the reader's trust and curiosity with every article you write.