I think friction has a lot to do with the power imbalance, as well as the objectives of people who buy into steem with fresh money. New big money wants to make money on that money, I can't think of many cases where people will say to themselves, "Gee, I made a lot of money in crypto, I better toss it into a firepit by investing in this social media website where at best I get hated on for wanting ROI, or I can try to vote on users who didn't invest as much money as me and hope some of them have some loyalty to both the platform and myself and we eventually help each other out," because that sounds straight retarded when I even type it out as a hypothetical.

The friction of course being the fact that many here are in precarious financial situations so they're likely to cash their SBD out so voting on a bunch of minnows isn't a guarantee that you'll grow your power like voting for yourself or other already wealthy individuals who don't have to do so much cashing out and powering down are.