I don't vote because i want curation rewards... I vote because i like a post and i want to tell the author that i support him. Also he may notice my vote and take a look at my posts and may up vote some of my posts too.

Secondly, if you want to be noticed by whales you are going to need a lot of votes and support from day to day users. I'm not sure how the whale interface looks but i'm sure they have a lot of filters to see only the most interesting posts to give their up vote.

Voting is not useless, commenting is not useless neither. You shouldn't be thinking about curation rewards at all.