Yeah, that's about right. Flagging is unfortunately quite political.
I haven't worked out the exact formula for reputation, but it's essentially your account's reputation-weighted all-time cumulative author rewards. Every time you get an upvote, your rep goes up a tiny bit, and the amount it goes up is bigger if the voter has large rep and/or large SP. Same goes for downvotes.
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Interesting. Now I'm trying to figure out why I thought that's how it works. What's the actual zero-point? Steemit-displayed 25?
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Ok, that must be the ultimate source of my misunderstanding. I'll have to check the code more carefully in the future.
Thanks both of you, this is helpful. Maybe it just seems like high rep = high voting power because that person often also has a lot of SP. It's a pretty strong correlation.