Agreed. I'm not saying there aren't good flags out there who play by the rules, or a culture where these relatives are afforded lots of slack because someone whispers "Do you know who Lt XXXX is?!" without the flag having any idea.
Unfortunately, in several of the cases where "mere mortals" would have been hammered/denied, but a pass was miraculously given, I've seen the fingerprint of a flag. In the service academy example, the furthest this Firstie honor hit ever got to the door was CS-41. Once his Dad realized the Comm wasn't going to "fix this" without intervention, the phone in CW rang. Thusly, the prodigal son arose from the bowels of Sijan, to graduate, on time.
Unrelated story - 1995: Squadron going on a phenomenal overseas deployment to a choice location. Borderline back-stabbing to go, since we cant take everyone. Roster is set 2 weeks prior when a brand new 2Lt shows up in squadron, who's Dad is a well-known 3-star at the deployed base. SQ/CC tells me we need to make room for new 2Lt. See, he got a call from Daddy saying how nice it would be to have the new Lt around for a while. We punt good guy/hard worker to make room for 2Lt. Daddy meets 2Lt at airplane, which was great, except 2Lt can't even give a tour because 2Lt is completely unqualified/not on mob status/kind of useless. 2Lt gets in Daddy's car, and we occasionally see 2Lt at the BX, the O'Club, etc... but at work, not so much, since 2Lt isn't qualified to do anything. And the 2Lt could never understand why they got treated like an outsider in the squadron!