I love all the suggestions you've given. But like you stated at the beginning of the article, it may be a lil idealistic.

Question: what happens in a worse case scenario? A voting ring of whales that simply refuse to stop and buffer each other up to defend against flags. What happens then?

I ask because I know at least 2 high stake rings and even though they don't appear to flag back, by calculations flagging them wont reduce their abuse more than 20% except we have whales on our end as well.

How plausible is a new voting algorithm that reduces rewards if you vote the same person more than twice in 24 hours?

Some abusers simply post once a day and upvote $300-400+
Obviously they will be able to escape previous algorithm. How do we combat them?