I dream about a world where talking about whales is irrelevant. The system should just recognize how well a person curates. I have nothing against whales earning more absolute profits than us, as long as we all are treated equally when it comes to our curation skill. Currently there is no variable that keeps track of curation quality, only the shitty reputation variable that is nothing more than a World of Warcraft level AKA quantity (it should be called popularity, not reputation!).
Since SteemIt is still in beta, everything is subject to change. So if author rewards suddenly drop by 50% users will have to get used to it.
Weirdly enough with currently only 2% going to comments i feel i get rewarded appropriately (at least from my experience).
Interest is actually one of the most important ones. If people can only get interest by buying STEEM (POWER), then you have the incentive for investors and the value of STEEM will grow immensly until it's stable (10-20 years into the future probably). But of course this is one more implementation that is currently not optimal. Can we even call it interest BTW? Isn't it just inflation (immunity/compensation)?