I wrote About those high SBD prices a couple weeks ago. I agree with most of what you wrote, and I am enjoying the post payouts as much as anyone, but there are other stakeholders to consider besides just the content creators. I don't advocate doing anything different at this point, but I'm not sure what purpose SBD serves if it can't hold the peg. It's starting to seem like useless complexity.
At any rate, from your post, this is important advice:
Regardless of what anyone else chooses to do, be aware that your SBDs are more valuable right now and if you want to sell them and you don't know how you might wish to seek this information out right now.
Agreed, I was writing this to the minnows and because of the BS some whales are pulling to try to justify what I would consider to be excessive self-voting.
However, I support their ability to do what they want with their stake, but I also approve of the community using flags to sort that out. :)
I think that sooner or later we're going to have to get over worrying about what other people do with their stake. It's probably just a matter of time 'til some app comes along that obscures its data before storing it on the block chain and controls who can see what inside the app. If you can't read it, how do you even guess at what to downvote?
I've been saying for a while that I think an upvote only algorithm modeled after a second price auction might be a better way to discover post values. That's what Google uses for Ad-words. Of course, too many people here are locked into the downvote way of thinking for that to be a realistic possibility in the foreseeable future.
So... as long as we have flags, I agree that they're there to be used.