Interesting. I guess I could see how people might vote on anything added to the curie channel which might decrease the whale curation reward. Still though, it would increase the reward for the author which, I thought, is the whole point. I get what you mean, though. There has to be a balance between incentives and goals. The whales make the world go round, so keeping the incentivized is critical to the project's success.
I'm not asking for altruism on the whale's part. In fact, in the long term, I think it's in their best interest to spread around the wealth a bit more which might include giving others higher curation rewards. Having STEEM spread around will increase the long term value of STEEM for everyone, IMO. It's even been suggested they should power down and let their STEEM dilute. Not sure about that approach, but the goal of everyone owning some value in STEEM makes a lot of sense to me. No one wants to be holding millions of worthless tokens while the crowd goes elsewhere.