The interest of the whales isn't exclusive to the interests of the community, or the fact that influence is incentivized. What's important is that if people can still post, comment and upvote or otherwise curate content in spite of "being censored" and their content isn't altered, then it's not censorship.
Flagging is here to stay because otherwise a large account could methodically rape the reward pool for themselves and nobody would be able to do anything about it, it makes sense because it would guarantee themselves a steady source of income. This would make sense to just about everyone, why spend the voting power on someone else when you can concentrate it all on yourself as the large accounts would do. You're getting author and curation rewards, duh, and nobody can disagree with that, because censorship, whale control.. because people post NSFW material in NSFW tag and make money.