There's some good thoughts here, and to some extent I recognize myself and my own reaction to my first flag in your descriptions.

I think you can see it both ways, there's good arguments on both sides.

I think whatever power you give the flagger, it will be abused. Like with government and surveillance. It's human nature. I think there's no way on earth flagging will be fair even half the time! Which, if true, means it mathematically cancels out its own usefulness (but I'm here talking about manual personal flagging, not steamcleaners, and also posts, not comments).

And, again, mathematically, or logically, flagging a worthless post has the same effect as rewarding a worthy one. Plus, when you remove rewards and redistribute them, you don't know where they're gonna end up: maybe they will end up on another post you hate equally! Whereas rewarding a post you like guarantees you agree with the distribution.

So you have a vote, and you can use it either to remove money - and have it end up who knows where, and create some bad vibes in the process - or use it to reward a post you like.

So I think flagging should be used rarely. Unless we're talking about the comment section of your own post, in which case I agree flagging is very useful to combat spam.

When it comes to posts, I think flagging should be contained within proper bodies with clear and fair rules, like steemcleaners, and whoever's itching to flag improper posts should just delegate his voting power to these bodies.