Odd... Where's the folks saying that whales leaving is a bad sign? I don't believe that anyway, it's better that power is spread out more, so I'm taking this as a good sign.
The bots are surprising indeed, though I'm not sure it would be able to account for votes coming from e.g. smartmarket where a single bot send can come with multiple votes adding to a particular value. More instructive to go by the values as someone else pointed out in a comment below.
Its good to have less whales even if it momentarily makes the value of our coin lower.
Whales cause crashes.
Better to build slow but steady.