Can you define for me what a "whale" is to you, because you appear to be using it incorrectly.
On Steemit, those who have the most SP have the most power to allocate rewards to others. It's not an equal vote thing, not that type of equality despite the HF19 being called "equality".
As long as there are curation rewards for voting, people will use streemian trails and autovoting to just get curation rewards, and not judge content for content.