Maintaining an environment where people can't pass off bullshit as truth, where open dialogue can be had... Is extremely important (imo).

You have a valid point here, but I also insist on mine: too many people left or even didn't/don't/won't join STEEM because of omnipresent flag abuse (just recently a potential investor from Switzerland told me he saw all these flaggs, even under official Steemitblog posts, and thus won't buy STEEM for sure).
We Steemians are so accustomed to this that sometimes we aren't aware anymore how devastating the impression for people outside of our microcosm is ...

It's OK for me not to implement the new muting feature, but then there should be other solutions, like for example the idea of an 'anti abusive flag committee' which I suggested above.