There could be a community service sort of thing, where users can vote on disputed flags for very small STEEM rewards. Once a certain amount of people have reviewed the decision and found a 75% favour in one way or another, then the damages(payout and rep deduction) could be applied--if the flag was agreed upon that is. If a flag is overturned, there could also be some sort of penalty, applied to the one who produced the flag-- for example, the weight of the flag is reversed and applied to them. This would discourage people from flagging for insignificant reasons.
There would be no way to abuse this because the whales could not use bots to manipulate the results.
There may have to be a lot more users before that could be implemented however.