El, here are my thoughts, if you go look in the photography sections there are a lot of photographers that put up their original work and since I've been on Steem, I can tell you this: it is their hot button issue, not just with you with EVERYONE, original content and on and on.
There has been discussion lately about the use of flagging, that it can lead to situations like this, without any way to mediate or even respond with "I'm new, no harm, no foul".
I got a cheetah-bot plagarism note once because I copied and pasted a sentence that had three foreign names in it that I didn't want to misspell-I then deleted the rest of the sentence except for the names and still got botted, I was pissed but in the scheme of things got over it..
There are so many places within Steem that you can selectively post, the majority of posts aren't seen but by these sub-groups anyway.
By using tagged categories you don't even run into most people or their articles/pictures.
So kick back, let go of the feeling of being beat up upon arrival, no one will remember this in a month. I don't think you want to start a war, if you brought "your people" in they'd get cold shouldered and wouldn't have any fun either. Stay open to remedies, this could have an easy solution...
This all sounds to me like someone got snarky and then totally escalated and can all be repaired.
Yes people do help each other out and sometimes move in a collective to promote the platform and keep everything fun. Maybe we all can hit the rewind on this.