Your thoughts are very similar to mine. Although I am not a whale or anywhere near there, my 2 cents are these:

• Yes, when I look at all the comments and upvotes on posts of big players, there is a very big amount of people that respond or upvote in the hope of getting a vote back. This is problem in my eyes since it does not add value to the platform and causes even more centralisation. The quality of the interactions is usually not as high as well. To a certain extent this is actually just a reflection of what often happens in real life as well, so I guess it is 'natural'.
• There is a risk of a vicious circle. The whales get votes and comments because they are whales and therefore remain whales. It get tougher and tougher for people who just started to get noticed.
• Most of the whales are people that have been around since the early days. One could argue that these are the people who made Steemit big and are the reason why it is here in the first place. It sounds fair that they are rewarded for that as well. My personal concern here is that, like you mention, these are people that know each other in real life by now as well. There are definitely some inner circles of whales/influential people on the platform. And yeah, you want to support your friends, even whales do that and it can be frustrating for others to see huge votes going from whale to whale, especially when the content does not seem to be in line with the height of the reward. Frustration causes people to leave or finding ways to game the system. But then again, this tends to be the case in real life as well when money or power are in play.
• There are a lot of good whales out here as well of course, stimulating development of the platform in all kinds of ways. As long as 90% of the whales and their intentions is good, I think we're good.

Hiding wealth does not solve things I guess. People will find ways to track wealth. I also kind of like the transparency because bad and suspicious behaviour will get spotted eventually.

This doesn't cover all the points you mention, I know, but these are the points that popped in my head first :-)