I think you are mixing up witness & whale. I am not a whale. I am a witness. I don't expect to get money for organising steemfest through my witness pay. I started steemfest because I feel the community needed a place to get together in real life. That takes a lot of time organising, about half a year fulltime with crazy working hours and rest of the year parttime. I was already organising the event and only later became a witness.
When I started becoming a witness the steemprice was 0.09 ct. I decided to heavily invest in hardware to become very reliable at almost break-even pricing. Then I was also not complaining when witness pay got lowered 5 times with the hardfork.
And yes now the prices have risen, so one might opt to lower the witness rewards (which are currently (only) 10% of the platform's new steem creation), but I feel witnessing and keeping the platform stable & reliable is an important job. If steem's blockchain would not work, there would be 0 people here and this whole experiment would have not even taken off.
Additionally with upcoming releases around Hivemind and SMT the platform would gain in interest and usage and being a stable producers would even be more important as external entities start building on top of SMT features. This could lead to even higher prices of Steem but also higher costs of node maintenance. Would you then opt for less pay because it is simply too much for being a witness, however it is thanks to stable producers (partly) that such an increase would have taken place in the first time?
I have to agree with you that Steempower and Voting is being used in all kinds of various ways which one can find abusive, however I see it as a creative way of using the platform's possibilities. One could see a voting bot as a Mine Pool. If things would need to be changed in preventing that behaviour (which is difficult one to solve - we have many discussion about this) it should be done through a Hardfork (same with lowering witness pay).
Having said that, I will definitely give an effort by changing delegations and doing something about this as far as I can, as suggested in other replies in this post.
About people leaving the platform, this is mainly through false expactations because of the threaded $ sign below each post, IMHO. I wanted to suggest that the problem is not so much whales getting the money not through blogging, but people expecting to earn money by writing, instead of enjoying the option of having a free social media platform where users are not being data-mined, used as the product of the freemium platform, where there is free speech without restrictions and which can simply not be blocked anywhere in the world and then having sometimes a (little) reward in crypto on top of that.
If you are top witness, you are automatically whale.
I appreciate everyone's effort in supporting Steemit community, from investors in hardware to early investors/entrepreneurs. But argument 'I invested in Steemit' can't be valid forever. People that invested in Steemit got their money back many times. Now they expect they should enjoy without much contribution (especially in blogging) and rest of people should try their best every day for crumbs. That's not gonna work from perspective of minnow, I can say it with 100% certainty.
Yes, the whole experiment wouldn't work. But also if no one is blogging the whole experiment wouldn't work also. That is why those whose blog deserve more then they receive now.
It's like somebody build company and say to workers 'Hey now you all gonna work hard every day for crumbs and I will take all the profits because I invested in company and also I'm paying for electricity and other expenses.' Yes you did invest, but morally it's not gonna work. That's the way our world is run today. Banks create money from nothing and they can buy anything. After that they can say we invested and you peasants work for crumbs. And the bullshit is created.
We shouldn't create that from Steemit. From minnow perspective it look it's that way.
I hope Hivemind and SMT will make things better, but my hopes are low because the problem of big gap between whales and minnows will stay.