Coco,
Your observations were correct, this system absolutely is flawed! It's basically a model of a corporate oligarchy, quite like the system of today's western society. There are e few in power whose "steem-wealth" is very visible in the trending section of Steemit, where you often can't believe for what they just earned hundreds of $! And then there is the rest of 95%, mostly "Minnows" whose rewards and visibility is minimal, and the middle-class "dolphins".

Who are these "whales"? It's people who were involved in the creation of Steemit, investors who bought themselves in, and it's all those users who were here from the beginning actively contributing because they saw the potential in it. Now these people collected (or bought) their "Steem Power" which is basically a share of Steemit, quite like in the stock market. The more shares you have the more power you have. Some use their power to vote for themselves and their (whale) friends to generate profit (see the trending section), some use it for supporting content they really like. Others use it for "corrective" purposes like downvoting plagiarism or content they consider abusive, some sell their power to minnows for fake upvotes, some don't do anything because they have so much shares that they just can sit and watch their profit growing (just go on a wallet of a 1mill. whale, keep reloading the page every couple of seconds and watch the numbers). All in all it is about attention, money and power - the fundamental ingredients of our current society. But show me a better system! If I see Steemit as a "corporate oligarchy" then facebook is a "corporate autocracy". On Steemit everybody can earn money, it's not easy but it is possible. On fb only fb earns all the money. On fb you earn "likes", and if you are lucky like myself to have a few hundreds of thousands followers you can use it as a self-promotion platform. Well, actually not anymore since they are blocking you if you don't pay for earning THEIR billions!

Now since it is real value involved here, not just "likes" and shit, and also because of the transparency of the blockchain, you can get another perspective on some people's characters. Yes, you see such a pitiful behavior like some "minnow" artists creating portraits of "whales", or eagerly commenting everything they post, licking their asses in order to snatch a bit of their attention. It's disgusting, but this is likewise happening everywhere in the real world. Only it's not so blatantly visible as it is here. As beautifully the Steemit network was constructed by its inventors, it's still populated by people with all their flaws. It's a simplified sandbox model of our society.

But still, I see a lot of potential and a lot of interesting content here because the standard is much higher than anywhere else - despite some of the overvalued crap in the trending section. If you keep posting interesting content more and more people will find and value you, even "whales". It just will take more than a week!

Cheers,
P