Linear rewards are making minnows matter in the math.

It's true that if the whales were to sit on their SP and not vote it then things would be a lot better for everyone else. The only problem with this is it's a completely insane thing to do, because staking has a time cost. Why would you stake SP and not use it?

Alternately they could all power down and hold Steem in hopes that it would go up in value as the rewards were distributed without them. That's only slightly less insane, and it has a pretty big Prisoner's Dilemma attached to it, because it drastically increases the self-voting rewards of any whale who chooses to stay. Not to mention we'd see even more volatility and downward movement in the price as they could choose to get out whenever they wanted.

Or they could power down and sell their Steem, which makes more sense for them, and we'd all get a lot more Steem out of the rewards pool but it wouldn't be worth anything.

None of these are good plans.

If enough of the big whales really felt the platform was better under the Whale Experiment and wanted to replicate it I suppose they could just start using their full power to flag other whale votes indiscriminately. I don't think that's a good plan either but it makes more mathematical sense, if not social sense.

In any case going to superlinear rewards is the exact opposite of the Whale Experiment. If you want to replicate that in the code you'd want extreme hyperbolic or even parabolic rewards. (And you'd have to find a way to prevent whales from just making a hundred dolphin accounts.)