The survival of Steem depends on the majority of stake being held by good faith voters. I think that has to be accepted as a premise, as attempting to work around it and minimize potential abuse by a dominant group of stakeholders compromises the integrity of the whole system's design. If it becomes clear that abusive whales dominate the network and the distribution can't be fixed by adjusting incentives such that they either cease their abuse or sell out then I think a fork to a new distribution would be the required fix. I hope that's never necessary.
The community is beginning to swarm and unite against abusive whale behavior in many cases. Services like @freezepeach are being created to raise awareness about potential abuse, and I think steemit.com and other sites should add a controversial tab to help raise the visibility of posts with both upvotes and downvotes.
I shared some other ideas in my reply to @hmushtaq also.
Thanks for sharing that, I didn't even know about @feezepeach!