RE: How about unflagging my posts?
quality is subjective, always has been always will be
Sorry, I think - depending on the topic - I can evaluate 'quality' very well. In my eyes this "quality is subjective" is often used as an excuse to defend non-quality stuff.
For example concerning science articles there are many criteria to evaluate 'quality'. It is important to be accurate, to argue in a logical way, to present the topic understandable, to cite your sources, to use instructive images and decent formatting.
I have the impression you want to defend @michelle.gent. That is nice of you, but actually I don't want to attack her anyway - I even haven't read any of her articles. :)
I am thinking about the development of the platform (and the Steem price) in general and from my point of view there are worse things thinkable than upvoting your favorite author only (let's say) twice per day with full voting power.
There have been a lot of post about voting. Either my Vote belongs to me, or it does not. I notice that all the limit a person's vote is only to the upvote. How about limiting the down vote, where are the whales when it comes to that issue. In hiding or justifying why we can not limit our downvote power.
If people read the FAQ, they will see that the only person you can effect with a down vote is someone with less power than you.
From the FAQ: "Your reputation goes up when accounts vote on your content. Getting downvoted by someone with a higher reputation can push your reputation down and make your posts less visible.
"Users with a lower reputation score are unable to affect your reputation."
I have no idea if that includes limiting a persons payout, it most likely does.
Science articles and Fiction Stories are two entirely different items. It is like comparing lemons and bananas. They are both yellow, that's pretty much where the similarity ends, as for which taste better, that is entirely subjective.
A science article is based on factual information and is as you pointed out easy to quantify as to whether or not it is a Quality Article.
Fiction is based on a writer's imagination, the only quantifiable quality is spelling, grammar and did they tell their story in such a manner that the reader enjoyed it. Completely Subjective.
But yes we are and most likely will remain in disagreement, about the downvote and limiting rewards, about how a person is allowed to use their vote, and about the right and wrong of one person deciding the correct amount of payout for a post.
Even now already your voting power is exhausting more and more with every upvote. And nevertheless your vote 'belongs' to you. After my model the returns would just diminish faster for accounts you have already upvoted recently. Of course even then your vote belongs still to you and not to me. :)
Naturally diminishing returns would also affect downvotes in the same way. So in case a whale is following you with downvotes, every single downvote would be weaker than the previous one. Then it would still be possible to flag content (for example plagiarism) if necessary, but less easy to hunt people ...
So you agree that quality is not subjective always. Apart from that also fictional stories can be evaluated concerning grammatical correctness, style, semantic richness ... I guess experienced reviewers will have various criteria to evaluate them. Of course there always remains the subjective part.