In my experience, it's very rare for whales to actually hand-curate content., @ikar59. Most of the ones I'm aware of either delegate their Steem Power to another account that pays them dividends regularly for doing so, set up their own bid bot voting service, or set their accounts to auto-upvote as part of a trail for @curie, @qurator, or a similar service (this is what @liberosist and @hendrikdegrote do, for instance). Some of them do little more than make 4-5 posts per day and upvote themselves on each one, while others follow those accounts and try to flag down their payouts.

If you caught the attention of a whale who actually hand-curates content, consider yourself lucky. I can't imagine any of them would look down on a @minnowbooster vote. In the grand scheme of the daily reward pools, a vote from minnowbooster doesn't drain hardly anything and is quite helpful to new fish. :)