I totally understand your frustration, @mindhawk.

The problem is there is no way to find the content you actually want to find.

Unfortunately, those whales are not only abusing the rewards pool but, more importantly, they are abusing the trending and hot pages. They are getting more attention than they deserve.

unless their intent is to make whale upvotes/resteems the only effective promotion on site.

It seems so. This is the point of my post here. They have to do this to incentivise people to buy Steem.

Consider how much difficulty I have in my blog finding even another single human to respond.
That is another problem actually. I call it the distribution problem. Steemit does not help in delivering the right content to the interested reader. I am interested in cryptos for example, and I find it very difficult to find high-quality content about that.