These thoughts seem pretty reasonable to me. My impression is that the original vision of the blockchain assumed there would be more of a crowdsourcing element going on, with a larger user base and probably a higher STEEM price -- curation by whales would probably be easier if they could lean on some content organically bubbling up to them from lots of plankton / minnows liking something, but that's not something that can really be relied on in the current environment.