I have tackled this problem few days ago with my article.
Basically a came to a conclusion that every user has to choose a battle that he can win and proceed with flags. It’s pointless to have someone like bernie flagging puny spamming accounts (that can be flagged by us), instead the whales have to counter the abuse of whales...if that won’t happen Steem is bound to lose value as long as haejin and sweet (and their likes) will continue to rape the reward pool. All the whales that are IGNORING the matter are SUPPORTING the matter, because there are only handful of them that can counter abuse of such a scale.
My humble opinion is that the whales are underestimating the matter. They feel like Steem is prospering so there really isn’t anything too wrong with it. I on the other hand think that we currently are in Altcoin bubble (slowly popping at the moment) and that Steem will soon be at around 1 dollar again...maybe even lower. This conclusion is based on the premise that users do search around the platform before investing heavily and as soon as they spot those worthless trending "celebrities" they will realize that it’s really not that much about quality of the content for now.