Thank you for the nice comment. The problem you mention exists but is completly taboo.

I recently tried to voice my opinion about this kind of horseshit on the french community, where some american author with a google-translate level of french language recently posted a very succesful serie of posts (probably the most succesful ever in 'french' language). Oh of course I got instantly downvoted by the american author and his whale friend (who have huge reps compared to mine). My comment got blacked out and even some real french people defended the american to get an upvote worth 11 cents.

In any case, I have no doubt the whales are driven by profit, and that's perfectly normal. As long as we don't start seeing real humans on top of the curation score, it will mean the curation system is broken - and consequently the rewards for posts are broken too.

Another problem is the current distribution of steem power, which is even worse than the distribution of fiat money in the world. The steem power inflation is so high that even if you widthdraw non stop, your SP keeps growing, so the whales stay on top, even when they widthdraw.

The devs of the steemit hq however are much more invested in STEEM to give up on the system. With the upcoming change to 5 votes per day (in 0.14), it will probably help humans a bit, we will see. We need to remember that STEEM is an experiment and give it a bit of time...