So the rewards being overwhelmingly extracted by whales isn't unfair, even though they got that stake through the ninjamine.

That's a silly contention, and I utterly refute it.

Furthermore, the continued concentration of Steem in the wallets of whales continues to drive down the price, worse for whales than anyone else. Want the price of Steem to rise? Get it into the wallets of as many people as possible, to create a market for it. Be the 'Helicopter' Ben Bernanke of Steem.

Regardless of what is allowed by utterly mutable code at present, or fairness to crabs in buckets, building a growing social media platform that is an effective mechanism to distribute Steem via upvotes is what will work to create capital gains and get the greedy bastard ninjaminer whales their lambos, and bags of rice for poor people on Steem everywhere.

Tweaking rewards curves, having curation rewards at all, or justifying flags is irrelevant, as all of that bullshit just keeps driving users away. User retention is the only metric that matters. All the rest derives from that.