All I'd say is, witnessing is a political position, and you have to campaign diligently to get higher up the ranks
Creating a new account requires 0.1 steem and 10 delgated SP. So whales with, for example, 1million steem can create 100 thousand accounts that vote for themselves (or a proxy account). Am I misunderstanding something?
That's true currently, however the account registration protocols are changing soon with Hardfork 20.
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/hardfork-20-velocity-development-update