Holy Shit. I took up a whole page.
22-tuple post!
The majority of the designs are really good, they just need cleaning up a little... I usually draw the base flag in whatever package will give clean lines, then use a vector program or a photoshop clone to get the fancy stuff on there.
EDIT: Example, say I'm making that Vancouver Republic flag. First I'd make the field, waves, triangly-thing, shield and circle in drawplus, a very simple vector program.
Next, the coat of arms, using MSpaint with white as the transparency.
Lastly, the shield. I couldn't find the original image you used, so I just clipped it from your flag. To get rid of the blockiness, zoom out, print-screen, paste and crop,
then paste the now shrunken design into the shield. All of that's easiest to do in the GIMP.
There you go. All without touching non-free software or RAM-Fucker 2000... erm... I mean, Inkscape.
EDIT EDIT: Page 420. I'm sure that number's important, if only I could remember why... maaaan.