I did post about the experience, you can witness the wonder of the entire spectacle if you dig around in my profile page https://steemit.com/@l0k1 I still think the whale in question definitely sometimes gets away with some quite snarky remarks but because of his wallet most are just hoping he'll be nice to them. It's an interesting dynamic in terms of the evolution of the Whale phenomena. Obviously better Whales won't be likely to vote something up just because it's complementary to them. In fact I think this was the 'bright side' to the dark side I saw.
I think as time goes on, the Whales who get there from being good writers will probably be better curators. What we have now is just the first round of investors doing what they think boosts their investment, curation-wise. Over time the effect of this will become more obvious what that should be. The amount of content will increase as well, and probably they will have to work harder for their stake.
I think that it will be necessary after a year or so to add filtering mechanisms or it will become too homogenised. Already with the size it is at, there is some degree of lowest common denominator thing going on. But imagine how it would be with a million Steemians! The interesting stuff would be much harder to find. This is what the SteemHordes thing would be about. Something to help curation, to foster a sense of community, and even, to enable a platform for marketing to some degree, like the Facebook pages, with a small, hand picked set of contributors. Hey, even the groups probably would end up with some kind of ranking system.
I also thought a lot, initially, about user-centric content prioritisation, that draws on information like who you follow, follows, and so on. There is some limited choices for sorting comment feeds but to be able to more accurately reflect how a user wants to see it, without pushing an agenda, it would be like facebook, except without the agenda. It would increase engagement, I am sure.