Whales holding a lot of HBD have to convert to Hive by necessity due to the complete and utter lack of liquidity in the market.

You should never convert your assets unless you explicitly know what you are doing.

Take the current state of the orderbook for example.
If I need to buy or sell a small amount (like 1000 Hive) then there is plenty of liquidity to get what I want immediately with an internal market order. If I want to buy 100k Hive the only reasonable way to do that is conversions given this amount of liquidity. Essentially we need more liquidity, but it still works alright as is especially for more casual users.