Do we really care so much what country people are from?
Think of it like this, if mods had to assign everyone their own custom personal icon it would take tons of time. But how many people will actually make their own personal icon that fits the specifications? Probably not that many. It might actually be manageable to do this. Even more manageable if you say they have to win some sort of tourney first.
On the other hand, unless you can automate it, if you say everyone gets flag icons, you're talking about giving manually giving an icon to thousands of people, and why, so they can have a flag for some reason? Give me the __FR one btw.