I personally feel that allowing freedom of speech is more important than not allowing abuse.

In my mind it is the harmfulness of abuse that should be approached. I know that its a difficult problem to solve, so difficult that the human race doesn't have good solutions for post moderation yet as a whole, on the other hand I think steem already provides an elegant solution, in the long run however the success of it completely depends on whether it allows people freedom or not, I've been around the block on steem, and my impression is that the types of policing that does exist is often more of a moneymaking racket than people making posts that are similar, badly researched, unsourced, etc etc.

Research articles is in my mind the lowest form of the blog, and personal opinion the highest and most valuable form, so that probably helps to explain why I have the thoughts on the subject that I do.

I like the anarchic, free atmosphere of the internet, it allows people to be themselves without living in fear, we all need to learn how to police outright scams, spams, properly abusive use of competitions, groups and services ourselves, so that we as a community can figure out what is the most elegant and effective patch that can eventually be used to automate the processes we do manually.

I hope we're looking at the situation with clear vision and the road ahead with enough foresight not to make steem boring, which it already is in many ways, to the frustration of many long term internet users.

I like your points, and I'm not trying to counter them in any way, I'm just hoping to add some ideas to the discourse.