I am in complete agreement. I made a similar post a couple days ago and someone replied that I seemed like a well-meaning person so I shouldn't get mired down in flagging wars and just go back to creating content.

While there is some wisdom in this, I have no interest in spending valuable time carefully creating posts only to have them censored by some capricious and malicious user and his bot farm.

Like you, I'm taking a step back and waiting to see how this all plays out. I think it's indicative of changes that need to be made at the platform level to keep flagging abuse from being a profitable enterprise for certain whales.

If it turns out the only way to have one's voice heard on steemit is to buy up a ton of SP and destroy other users' content, this is not the kind of site where I will be spending my time.