Wow! Thank you for this detailed and well thought out response. I posed some really difficult questions, which are hard for anyone to answer.
One of the hardest parts, I think, is that there is a disincentive to downvoting. Until there is a separate pool of "flagging power" so that we can all combat spam and plagiarism without loosing out on curation rewards, I think we will continue to see our "rewards pool justice league" taking as much (or more) from the rewards pool, as they add back into it via flagging.
I'm not so optimistic about the separate flag pool. I don't think it's much to ask to give up "curation" -- most of us suck at that anyway. If we aren't using flags now I don't think we would use it in the new system either. If we all just took 1 of our daily votes to flag something, I wonder what it would look like. Hmmmm....
well, it doesn't cost me very much to flag, and I do when I see things that I can effect. The issue is for users with a large stake, who could get as much as 20sbd in curation, they have to give that up in order to flag, and those are the users who can really make a difference, but end up responding with spammy selfvoting as a result.
I think that reinforces the point though. If they can't be trusted with their stake not to spam, I don't think they can be trusted to flag responsibly either with an entirely separate pool.
I think the issue is they feel they are missing out on curation, and are trying to make up for it. I think if there was a separate flagging pool we might see a lot more flagging to a positive effect.