Largest SteemPower holder control the narrative as intended!
That's where Steem is expected to get it's value from.
With great power comes great responsibility though, and whales that don't behave themselves for the long benefit of the system get put to their place by other whales or groups.
It's obviously much easier to see upvotes as being the origin of new money than it is see downvotes as a more fair distribution of new money. So I can understand where you are coming from.
There would be no way for a "whale" or anyone for that matter to appropriate itself a larger % of the reward by downvoting everything else than it's post with a 25% premium.
Consider how much more of an unfair reward pool appropriation is done by collusion group (guilds & trails) upvoting each-others irregardless of the content. They're not sufficiently being put in check because of high cost of flagging.
In other words it's cheaper by at least 25% for everyone to create more bullshit content to upvote than it is to uncover BS self-upvoter group and flag them.