I think the problem is that the special sponsoring you did for one author, should be the way this ecosystem works normally, every day; Good content and creators gaining upvotes by people, orcas and whales, only because these people want to see more of their content and to have them here in Steem, rooted and with more power.

Every day this isn't happening, is a danger to the existence of this whole platform because some other platform can come up with a ways to get the behavior model right.

But as you said, the trend is right, even if the change is happening very slowly. I just hope whales would take their role a bit more seriously. They have incredible amount of power here after all.

Now that we're seeing Steem Engine tokens and small communities with their own tokens pop up, we might actually start to see this kind of thing happening more and more. Real, genuine communities around topics other than Steem. What a incredible valuable ecosystem would this be if we can get it working right!