I agree with most of the points you made. In my opinion the real problem is with the content discovery. Since whales already have enough followers their posts generally gets upvoted if the content is good. The problem is with the content discovery for the new authors. Not many people are ready to spend time reading the posts of their friends and followers. They are constantly looking at the posts by whales so that they can upvote them in the hope of getting some curation rewards.

So we will need to turn the tables around give more rewards for the discovery of content by authors whose average earnings are low. Since whales with large number of followers already get enough votes and rewards, the curation rewards for discovering their content should be reduce. Adding curation rewards for resteeming can solve this problem to a certain extent. Remember that an upvote doesn't increase the visibility of a post, it only increases the rewards for the author of the post but it doesn't help in making the post reachable to others. If possible we should identify who are having a network effect in making content more popular and reward them accordingly. That will create a level playing field. Irrespective of whether you are a whale or a minnows you will be in the lookout for the good content and resteem them to make sure that it gets the visibility it deserves. Wildspark is already doing this successfully and may be steemit can learn from it.

If we don't address this problem Steemit will turn out to be like the Ghost cities of China where there are lot of high-end skyscrapers that have no occupancy at all. Just that in steemit there will be lot of users writing posts but not enough people reading them even if they are worthy. I hope Steemit addresses this problem by the earliest :)