Great post @meno, and many great points raised, here...
Not sure how to reply without ending up with a dissertation, so I'll stick to a few impressions to augment what you wrote, based on my 10 months here...
One of the things in the whole "good whales" issue is that most of the original whales of Steemit were developers/techies and blockchainiacs, rather than content creators. Which is a little ironic, for a system billing itself as a social content site. One of the points I've been beating to death since my earliest days here is that PEOPLE build communities, tech/code does not.
Be that as it may, content creation has always taken somewhat of a back seat to "grinding the gears" with app developments and bots and automation.
Now, given that so many good whales ARE developers, and they DO sincerely want to maximize value (and their investment) we tend to end up with a situation their impression of "what's best" is limited in scope. Steemit will never become more than "niche" in scope UNLESS more attention is paid to content, and less to code.
How that will actually play out, I don't know.
I say you did a great job at making your point, and I would like to believe that we could get the input of some whales regarding this very subject. It really is on their best interest as well, like you pointed out, if we can attract better content creators, we can effectively affect the cost of Steem positively!
I appreciate your input, the fact that you are for all tends and purposes a vet of the system, reassures me that we are on to something bring up this subject.
Much success
@meno