There's a really good reason to be hesitant to flag posts, because it is mathematically inefficient.
Every flag is a value trade-off for the potential to reward something that you actually like. Think of flagging like voting up by a tiny, distributed amount everything except the one thing that you're flagging. Everything. So instead of taking that amount of voting power/SP and rewarding someone who has made a discussion of RPG mechanics that you enjoy, you have taken that voting power/SP and rewarded everything but the one bit of spam that you've touched – including every other bit of spam that you haven't flagged down.
It's a bad strategy.
So the system is broken. OTOH, making them free would be begging for over-use. I dunno what the answer is then. Maybe the first four each day could be free.
No, the system is as the system is. People have broken interactions with the system because they have invalid understandings of the system. They don't understand how to use the system to get what they want and instead just end up flailing at it, wasting their time and effort, but that's not the fault of the system.
A flag is of particular use in one singular situation, when you want to counteract the amount of SP invested to raise the rewards of a specific and particular piece of posting. If your specific interest is on that particular work and making sure that the rewards are not going to be paid off, then a flag is the right thing to do. But you need to do it with the full knowledge that you are implicitly voting up everything else that person has posted by sending the SP that you can speak for on that posting back to the reward pool.
And that is effort that you could've put toward rewarding something specific that you wanted to reward.
Once you understand how the system works, it makes perfect sense.
Given the amount of abuse going on within the steem blockchain of the ongoing Whale Wars when it comes to flagging? I don't want those idiots to have more weaponry to deploy against each other and everyone else.
Quite the opposite.