Good thoughtful post. I have a similar view as I was caught up reading about the flag wars. There are people (or bots) that don't follow anyone, have bought big SP influence and sell bot voting service and rake in the money. Then they down vote the heck out of anyone with high quality content who take in a good amount of reward and call them reward pool rape.

I hate to say this, but I've come to the conclusion that something like steemit is actually a good reflection of society. There are a lot of good people in this world, but there often seems just as many bad characters looking for an easy way to life by scamming, hacking, etc. It's unfortunate, but a site like this that is decentralized is just crying out for people to cheat. So I'm actually convinced now that there has to be some element of centralization where at least the biggest abuses have some counter balance. Or they could code something into the system to stop the bots or change how much power is given for flagging.