This seems a little off. The same could happen on APPICS if I went in a just bought up all the tokens I could. I would then have control over how they get distributed.

If you don't have a whale in your friends, you don't earn anything from your quality posts.
My understanding is that if I have a lot of SP a single vote from me could make a big difference. But most of the "huge" whales by SP aren't active anyway.

I went over to @steemitboard and sorted by steempower. The first 25 after removing the ones that have less than 10 total upvotes, have a total of 32,672,724 SP

Then I took the next 100 and did the same thing and they had a total of 25,775,190 SP

So the whale still have more but not really that much.

The top 3 accounts have 59,899,272 SP alone, but have 10 upvotes between them. They have the power, but don't throw it around.

Conclusion

The dolphins and minnows have the real power, but getting them all to agree that something is good, or even interacting at all is hard. This means that it is going to be hard to have large winners at all.

The same will likely happen at @appics when they get bigger, and with the token distribution that they have, it will be harder for them to cope.

Again, all my opinion. I'm still trying to figure out how STEEM works, but I'm a quick study.