Yes, there is no silver bullet for flag wars or vote abuse. Fagging actually returns the rewards to the reward pool, therefore, it is not that bad as it sounds. It is the necessary evil to fight some kinds of abuses. One of the things that can be done is that with "code" to make it less visible so that creativity is encoruaged not fighting. That's why trending page is not working since it shows all the limitations. Probably, hivemind/communities and SMTs will solve some of the problems. Within communities there will be some form of moderation, unhealthy behaviors will be contained within the community of the framework. Also, SMT will helpful in this case too. Here is a good post written by @andybets where he discussed how SMT can solve some of the vote abuses or flag wars

The distribution of the new tokens (SMT) will generally not follow the current Steem distribution, and this means that there will be different whales, dolphins and minnows in each community. It seems possible that in some cases the distribution of tokens might be so equal that such stratification isn't even relevant. Because in some communities it will be possible to vote on a single post with multiple SMTs, we will be able to declare token X as the reward token, and token Y as the promotion token for example. Then for example, a website could construct a 'trending' page based on the assignment of promotion tokens whilst reserving the reward tokens to pay developers for their work. If my understanding is correct, this could solve a big problem for Steem by eventually replacing the conflated Steem vote.