I'm still new at this blog, so maybe I'm looking at things from naive lenses. And my experience here might change my viewpoint in the future. But...

"I think one of the biggest problems facing steemit is that a lot of the whales and dolphins self-vote and stay within their own groups and communities on steemit and only vote for themselves or their friends. and vote on each others' postings making them the only ones doing well on the platform, making it hard for a minnow to grow."

If I was a whale/dolphin, I'd self-vote myself, in fact I upvote some of my posts (although reading through some comments, it looks like it is frown down upon). And staying within your own community is a natural human trait. The communities and society is also artifically structured to keep people within their communities (i.e. there was an issue with search engines bringing up search results that are popular within the communities of the person who are using it).

Just keep it up. As the other guy had said, you've only been here two months. I've been here only a little over a week.