Well Said. I have a lot of faith on the Steemit project because this is an absolutely amazing idea, with that being said, we still have the problem of the whales. While I do not think that is bad at all to be a whale, I think the way the system is designed discourages newcomers like me from curating content.
Why would I want to upvote anything with my limited resources if other people are not doing it? So in a way, it kind of forces you to either:
Follow the whales and upvote whatever they post and you will get curation rewards.
Use something like Steemauto to help you.
Suck it up, and produce great content for long periods of time while having enough patience of dealing with whales whose posts never leave the top hot/trending spots because their sheer power.