I feel your opinions regarding Steem etiquette are pretty well rounded and align well with my own.

It is particularly striking when the big guns (steem-rich) seem to go on the offensive against the steem-poor person:

Yes, if a person is obviously copy/past plagiarizing or obviously vote farming, and will not stop, this might be grounds for continual flagging, because the sharepool is limited, and it is taking from the people who are genuinely putting in work to earn a piece of the pie, but disagreement of context downvotes is suppressing free speech. There might be some exceptions to this, like if content is being downvoted that would otherwise be someone benefiting from the suffering of others.

There are examples of power abuse here and downright bullying, and not many want to touch it/confront it, because there is little that can be done aside from making yourself a target.

I've always been a proponent of consensus based downvoting. That is, if someone disagrees with content, then it is "reported" and goes into a voting trial period, where the people get to decide, and stake weight should have nothing to do with the outcome. The downside to that, is mass account creation which could be used as a tool to protect gamers. If it's stake weight consensus based, then it would only need a few whales to agree or disagree, so generally speaking , it's difficult to imagine a perfect downvote system. Being that this system is able to be gamed with abuses, it's tough to argue the need for flags.

The problem with human beings, is opinions opinions opinions, and even that is an opinion which another human being might find disagreeable! Sometimes I think we are just too smart for our own good, another opinion though 😛

Nice thoughts @logiczombie.

P.S. I'm happy to hear Steempeak is working well for you!