This means the decisions for witnesses and proposals can be decided by a small subset of whales.

The same is true also to witness votes. But we can change this(especially with the help of independent users ranging from 5k HP to 20k HP or even below 5k with strong voices). By pooling their stake to one single account(manage by the users themselves) and proxied their voting rights to elect new sets of top witnesses on a monthly or weekly basis. We need to make them more active by putting them back and forth to the rankings.