Absolutely. It's a fairly easy game to play too, if you wish to play it. Befriend whales, write consistently, and you'll inevitable get on the trending page. However, this post is about the curators, not the authors.
(This will get a lot harder with Hardfork 19 when whales will no longer have a dominant influence.)
I definitely get irritated by the "quick, let's upvote this whale before anyone else so I can get a big curation reward!" upvoting. I would say read every article you upvote. And I have noticed that I have to put in serious effort to go find the new people and upvote them, because that part doesn't happen automatically. Still, though, I don't think there is going to be much change in how people curate, so it's good for the minnows to know that if they want to put in the effort to promote their work, it won't be too difficult to start reaping rewards. Even though I personally don't do that much, it's nice to know that I could start anytime, and that helps me to not worry too much about my post rewards.
I hope curators realize that playing that game is not lucrative in terms of curation rewards. With popular authors, votes start coming in from the first minute, at which point you're forfeiting up 90+% of your curation rewards. Piling on the votes after they have trended is even worse - that leaves you with absolutely nothing. Same applies for a lot of autovoting bots coming in at 20 minutes. Indeed, it costs you voting power instead.
Instead, it is thousands of times more profitable to vote on new, undiscovered posts, and then getting the word around about them. That is not always possible, but a middle ground can be found - voting on "middle class" authors is often much more profitable than the regularly trending authors.
More about this here - https://steemit.com/curation/@liberosist/mind-your-votes-ii-a-guide-to-maximizing-your-curation-rewards
I briefly tried to play that game a couple times, and you're right. It doesn't work well. I just upvote stuff I like. If it happens to be trending already, then I upvote it. If I like it and it's undiscovered, then I also upvote it. I'd love it if that's how everyone upvoted, and then if a lot of curators made a point to look for undiscovered material. I don't see it changing too much from the way it works now, though.
That's the best way to do it, though I'd recommend thinking twice about upvoting a Trending post. The voting power saved could be more effective voting on undiscovered material.