But... whales don’t decide a thing.
Whales decide who the top witnesses are. The top witnesses decide the blockchain parameters, make the decision to hardfork, etc. Are you contending that because whales do not directly decide these things for witnesses that they don't have influence in the decisions?
They also set the distribution for the lions share of the rewards from the reward pool (directly with the voting and indirectly via curation rewards).
Steem is a capitalist society, that further reinforced by the importance of vests for witness voting. But I’m not willing to run with the title as such because if we do we may as well say that we are merely POS rather than DPOS. There is still room for non-purely whale powered witnesses.
Only if some whales abstain from voting. With the current distribution of vests, the whales will always be able to choose the top witnesses.
I agree, the "D" is important, the whales don't make the decisions directly. Still, your contention that "whales don't decide a thing" is not quite correct enough.
That's pretty much what I was getting at. Thanks :)