Hey @inertia
Some topics here close to my heart at present.
In my opinion and based on experience, self-voting with a low SP holds less value than a well-placed vote on a comment of another users post. This is a message I give out to the 20 minnows I delegate to.
I can see why, especially under current 'market conditions', a larger stakeholder would self-vote and not feel there is any issue with that - others around you can't give you what you can, and many are delegating stake out to robotic voters of unviewed content.
As far as flags go, I feel that many (including me), just haven't got into the mindset of reserving VP each day for this increasingly important part of the Steemit experience. I'm slowly getting over the 'retaliation risk' involved and honestly, most of my flags are directed at users who are either spamming or pumping crap content with bots - both of which are no real financial threat to most regular contributors.
@flagawhale are currently trying to reward flaggers of our most popular analyst, check their wallet for details.
Cheers.