Yes, I read every word of your article.

What do you think?
It is important to see that there are people interested in developing methods that allow a clean ecosystem of plagiarism and spam, I congratulate you for working on it and I encourage you not to give up but to raise more encouragement. (Raise more because your phrase "assuming you have read this far" tells me of the possibility that you have written thinking that some people would not be interested in reading).

Does this seem like a good and (mostly) fair approach?
I think if it solves the problems of manual reviews to subjective complaints, and when the reward is defined many will be motivated to participate. But mainly I see very positive the method of multiple negative votes and anonymity, this way you can report more freely.

Does the idea make sense and will it improve the Steemit platform?
It makes a lot of sense and of course if implemented successfully it will bring a great improvement. Although from my personal point of view what really hurts the economy of the system is the use of voting bots, but this is something that is not considered an abuse here. So it will remain a harmful cancer.

Would you file an abuse and "play the game"?
If I detect any article that meets the conditions to be filed as abuse of course I would file it.

What are your thoughts on the challenges of anonymity and "whitelisting"?
I know very little about programming but I'm sure it represents a tough challenge, especially the part where an author can write their article somewhere else, detecting that it's the same author writing on steemit and that it's not plagiarism, creating an algorithm that does it automatically doesn't sound like an easy task.