The impact of self voting was definitely considered in the original architecture design. This was why the reward curve was so heavily skewed in favour of whales. The justification for not simply leaving this capability out (it's just a simple if/then test) was complacence born of probably many years being accustomed to platforms like Reddit and Digg. Neither of those platforms are going to be around in 5 years time, whereas Steem, or its descendants, will be dominating the internet.
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The white paper has a bizarre ref to Metcalfe's law to justify the n^2 reward curve. Metcalfe's calculation has been shown to be inappropriate as a measure of "network worth". The maths is simple: a network with N users has a max N(N+1)/2 connections, and as N increases can be approx to N^2. But this is to calc computer power needed, not social worth. More recent calcs show this to be closer to N.logN so approx proportional to N is the right order of mag.
Basically, not everyone connects to everybody else in a network, but rather superusers emerge and most users connect to one or more of these. Therefore as N increases, the size of the network only increases proportional to N.logN and not N^2.
So the new whales are not the same species as the old whales, it seems. I've seen so many recent posts arguing that a whale-sized self-upvote on a comment is simply return on investment and to be expected. And your comment about complacence and custom on Reddit and Digg still fuels my interest in that game theory model!