For me the main problem is lack of qualified curators, and limit of total value that can be allocated via reward pool.

When you look at it, and try to qualify what votes actually worth, beyond the reward, but in term of what intention it reflects from the voters, it's hard to really estimate what the vote actually mean in relation to content quality.

When you have real content publisher or editors, or company really oriented on monetizing content, you can always know a bit what is the editorial line, and knowing if the editor head put the book or article in 1rst page or in forefront, it mean it fit into a certain line that is known to public.

Or you can say the popularity among a community mean something in itself, because you know what kind of content the community will make popular, so if you look at popular post on a cooking forum, you know that because you know the community there is a certain quality to popular post that give the value to the rating system and to the platform as content publisher.

With steem i would believe its still mostly coming from crypto investor, who are not especially content editor or publishers, and are used to fast roi with crypto hype, based on blockchain trading or so, and making money with marketting of content and author is not at the core of the buisness.

At best whales can allocate the fixed amount of reward generated by the system, and with in mind to allocate significant part of it to themselves as roi, rather than really marketting content to make income via content marketting and selling, because no money can be injected in the system from the exterior to really "buy" content or reward author, only whales allocating the reward pool, and the goal is not primarily to sell content, but revolve around crypto trading and technology hype around blockchain, rather than being qualified content editors wanting to promote author to a large audience in order for them to make predictible profits out of a certain quality of content.