"To me, it's an expression of opinion. Don't know how you feel about those ;)"

I love expressions of opinions, but not when they're attached to negative financial outcomes. In fact, with the looming threat of flags, I think it's safe to say that you've got a lot of disingenuous people posting stuff that they think others want to hear. Wouldn't you like to see people post their honest opinions without fear of reprisal? Let's say I sink a lot of work into an epic post, and someone updoots it to a face value of $10.00. Whether or not I have the value in my possession yet, is not the point.

The point is, I did the work and someone tried to convey value. When you intercept this conveyance with a downvote, you disrespect the stakeholder who upvoted it, and also the content creator who is already working for only a pittance. It'd be like if you went into a restaurant and snatched a waiters tip and burned it with fire. You didn't steal the money because it wasn't even in the waiter's possession yet, in fact, had he not seen you do it on the security camera, he would have been none the wiser. But he did see it, and he knows where the people intended for the money to go, and thus, he feels as if though he was robbed. Which is the truth, was the man robbed or not?

"It becomes a flag war when those who can't stand others expressing their opinions use it as a weapon, strictly personal and no matter the content they use it on, and even attacking others by association (resteems for example)."

Ahh, I see. so your downvote is just an opinion, but their downvote is a gun? That's kind of hypocritical if you think about it. Right now I'm imagining a car full of gangsters who do a drive-by and then go out to eat at MikkyDees. Then the restaurant gets shot up because of the clap back. Three people die, and the confused hoodlum says to the police officer: crying "I don't know why they did it, all we did was express an opinion. We didn't even kill anybody, and they killed three of my homies."

"A tip jar system where you can tip yourself without consequences from a limited shared tip pool doesn't give talented authors an edge, so that's an idea which has nothing to do with the idea behind steem. If you want to tip someone, pay it from your own pocket, not from the community's."

See there you go thinking that reward pool is yours. You can only take what the rate limited voting allows for. This mechanism was put into place making it impossible for people to draw more than their fair share from the pool. If the maths are wrong, fix the rate-limited voting, crank it down a notch.