You're not wrong completely, but you definitely read too much into the steem whitepaper. Back then we had one overlord and bunch of lower lords. The overlord is gone at least. And look at that place now, power is way more concentrated than here.

I once tried to start a project to create a content recommendation system for new users, but failed to attract any contributors to help tagging posts to feed the algorithm. A lot of the issues you describe come from small users not being engaged enough IMO. And telling them they're powerless might contribute to this. It's not just the big guys voting for the same stuff all the time, there's a lot of herd mentality (and appeasement) here unfortunately.