I am not convinced Whales would even need to communicate to be able to appear to coordinate. I think the activity you describe might just be a consequence of stake being saturated.

In the real world, when a particular industry becomes saturated with only a few key players, there is little appetite to compete on price and most companies just don't lower prices naturally, they don't have to.

I think the issues you describe with the whales having complete control over witnesses is basically a function of a stake weighted chain. If Whales do not manage the chain well, the price of HIVE will naturally go down and it makes it easier for anyone to become a whale. That is where we are at today. It's easy to become a whale but it's hard to have an impact on governance by simply buying HIVE. A big investor would be stupid to try to take over HIVE the way Sun tried to after HIVE was created. The fork of HIVE from Steem was evidently very painful for all involved but it also cost people a lot of money; that's just bad business.

The fork was painful but provided a lot of value; it made the control premium of HIVE theoretically infinite.

I guess if we assume whales do backdoor deals off chain it wouldn't matter if told you if I bought my stake or not. If I'm being too honest people will assume I'm just lying, who could ever be honest in today's world?

The problem is, if I told people someone gave me my stake people would assume it's the truth because who would ever invest in HIVE when the whale cabal runs the show?

I think to believe a Cabal is likely, could be reasonable but I would need proof before I would be willing to entire the idea. Valueplan not managing their funds well has been a running joke for a while. People call them out on chain for it a lot. I’m not sure I really care what Value Plan does, I have never been a position to support their proposal so I’ve never had time to review it or think about it.

I do think if people want HIVE to succeed then people should want whales to do what is in their best interest. When whales stop doing what is in their best interest then HIVE will surely fail.

I think the rewards distribution is the really interesting point about your comment. There should be data to back it up and I would like to see what is driving whales getting most of the rewards if that is the case. I guess if whales owned 90% of the staked HIVE I would assume they would get 90% of the rewards.