Excellent post, up-voted and re-steemed.

I am only just starting to spend any serious amount of time on Steemit but immediately I see the very serious problem of misuse of flagging. I can see there is a rationale behind the flagging feature, but the problems seem to me greater than the advantages.

Just a thought off the top of my head - could there be some adjudicating authority that quickly assesses flags and removes them if there is not a sound reason (the 2 purposes you give above seem entirely reasonable to me).