I agree with you in many many ways, but I think you are failing to see this is an issue with steem that can truly be applied to all content creators, not just big youtubers.

Anthony is an important example, because he put a lot of effort to reach out in the music community and others on steem. He really did have a lot of organic interaction with many steemians, as you can see on his profile. Those people were often average users- not whales.

The current system incentivizes whales to curate selfishly, curating the same people who will curate them, or those who are already established on the platform.

Anthony wasn't a whale, but the ways he would bring value to steem exceeded that of just investing his own money. With the steem blockchain, the potential of bringing users and investment is vastly outweighed by the social circumstances and interactions with the same 50 or so whales.

There are plenty of other content creators on steem that don't understand the social dynamics, and therefore aren't rewarded properly.

I heed your point that content creators can get used to the ad revenue algorithms on youtube. I think that steem should be able to do better than these systems, especially so with certain individuals who can bring a lot of value with their content, like Anthony.