I'm fairly certain the whales would support something like the self upvote block. They voted in favor of lowering the payouts to linear instead of exponential. As you said, they're smart enough to know the steem they're accruing is useless if no one is using the platform.
I'm not sure how to get the ball rolling. I know @ned has the power to change things but beyond that I don't know anything. I wonder if we couldn't get everyone to coordinate in sending him .01 steem private messages explaining our frustrations and what we think it would take to fix the problem
I'm still pretty new here myself and don't blog enough due to time constraints to have an educated answer (as in: what's a ".01 steem private message?" See? nube ignorance :-) But if you come up with a plan, sign me up.