Great stuff. As a 10k+ user on SO, I look at a moderator queue with 300 flags and despair. There's nothing I can do to help clear the vast majority of those flags.
I wonder about that last paragraph, though:
To prevent the moderation queue from filling up with problems that might cure themselves, these flags don't even go in the moderator queue until some period of time (TBD) has passed.
One of the main benefits of active moderation, in my opinion, is clearing out the truly awful stuff quickly, faster than the community can. I don't care nearly as much about the two-year-old bad grammar as I do about an offensive rant from five minutes ago, that sparks twenty useless comments.
The automatic moderation you talk about can deal with this. But it needs to have a threshold low enough not to let the garbage fester, while not so low as to lead to vigilante deletion. Not easy to do.
EDIT: You might also consider the number of flags a post receives when deciding when to show the flags to moderators. One flag: probably not a problem. Five flags in the span of ten minutes: problem.