flagging authors who put in a lot of work will discourage them from writing.

If you assume they are ONLY writing this to earn from the reward pool then yes, better they stop writing. You should instead wonder who would pays to promote their chapters to steem. Maybe they'd expect to sell more books by getting known on Steem?

Start by seeing the full circle of what brings value to Steem before going around giving advice about what content should be promoted or not.

If you have some arbitrary criteria for views and payout, you should probably fix the distribution of steem power not the rewards.

WTF is this? I obviously do have arbitrary criteria for payouts and NO, I'd never advocate for stealing stake by redistributing it arbitrarily.

Given the whole of your work at redistributing the reward to random minnows solely because they are poor and deserving and completely disregarding content it wouldn't surprise me that's what you meant.