Whales can, and do, use their Steem to help people, and do it a lot. But their Vote Power is linked to their SP. They either can manage their funds responsibly, which means to earn when possible, which the Steemit code links to their curation, or they can be fiscally irresponsible, and curate like a wild-eyed idealist.
Capital markets exist, and offer capital gains to incentivize investment. Steemit, by creating this new way to profit from investment, has caused VP to be used for financial manipulation, rather than simply to promote content by rewarding creators.
Investors do deserve to profit from their investment, but cursing Steemit with financial manipulation in lieue of curation is not a good way to do that. Last month Steem price rose by almost 10 fold, and investors realized substantial gains, because Steemit grew rapidly.
This is an appropriate and time honored mechanism for rewarding investors, and as Steemit grows, that mechanism will work. However, as users are discouraged by seeing 99% of rewards inuring to 1% of accounts, they perceive the platform as unfair, and start to use phrases like 'rewards pool rape'.
Worse even than that perceived unfairness now, is VP decay which leaves us only 10 votes to cast a day. New accounts are floundering, lost in the sea of more established authors and deprived of votes, because many people have resorted to self voting with their ten votes out of desperation.
If new users fail, Steemit will fail to grow, and the financial manipulation of curation will be the only way investors profit, until that fails too, when the price of Steem collapses as Steemit does.