I appreciate everyone's different ideas on this, and I don't pretend to have a solution, but I don't think this is it, either, if I'm honest. The flag war people are going to flag war as long as flags exist; that's just how they roll. What stops the little guys from flagging isn't the lack of curation rewards - because our curation rewards aren't much to speak of no matter what we do - it's fear of retaliation from a whale. If a person has enough money to buy bot votes that will put their post on trending for hundreds of dollars, they can flag you into oblivion for pinging it with your pennies worth of downvote. Us minnows will likely flag spammers, because the spammers can't flag us to hell, and it doesn't matter if we don't get our teeny tiny maybe a fraction of a Steem curation. I've flagged spammers. My friends have flagged spammers. But flag a whale and you can kiss your rep and your rewards goodbye.