This is an important point. There was always going to be a larger stake distribution during the early stages (technically still there now in the grand scheme of things) because there was hype, more discussions, and the content standard was finding its feet

Exactly. I guess this adds to the point I am making in the post that for as long as I've been around here (4 years soon) people have complained about how those that came earlier than themselves had an unfair advantage (mostly referring to early miners or people posting during the 100% hyper inflation period on STEEM), not realizing that there could still be decades ahead of newer people looking at those people that day as the lucky ones. But again, people only want to spend time and grow their accounts once it has already proven to be successful, which of course is when it is typically less rewarding purely stake-wise.

I don't think people realise how reliable the consistent rewards are from commenting and engaging within the community, and if the time is spent mingling and getting to know other creators the stakes soon add up.

I seen this better than most as the first thing I put out on this chain was a comment that got a pretty decent payout (especially considering I had 0 followers yet). Not only did it get good payouts, but the fact that I got some good followers from it was the main reason my introduction post not only did well, but went to trending and resulted in instant-fame for me (which itself was mind blowing, as I had established a set of expectations coming from the traditional bloggin sphere where it may take months to earn your first dollar and to get others than your mum and friends to read and comment because you shared them a link on Facebook and asked nicely). So commenting in an early stage of a community is not only key to get rewards, but also to build relationships and connections with others aspiring to build stake.

Although, who cares about being a whale, too much responsibility and pressure...

Haha, I recall being on one of those voice chats with Anrew Levine when he was still head of communications at Steemit and they were trying to get people optimistic about SMTs + Communities. He said that there would be different tokens for all kinds of different communities and that there would be "food whales" and "yoga whales". I remember just wondering how that could possibly have sounded attractive to people. Who wants to be a "yoga whale" and basically have the "job" of curating yoga content? Well, maybe some. To me, those ideas never seemed attractive.

I would rather see platform economic models where the success of a community's growth can come back to token HODLers through some kind of decentralized and autonomous dividends. Whether it is the buyback and burn program that LEO was doing with their ad revenue, or other more creative ways of capturing the value that the platform creates and distributing it in a trust-less way to token holders (I have more ideas for how to make that work than I can fit in to a comment so will have to be for another day).

In such a scenario, the ideal role of a whale should simply be to contribute to making the platform increasingly attractive for more people to join, spend time on through content posting, consumption and discussion etc.