I've seen single bible verse posts, with no other effort or content, rewarded with 20 dollar upvotes by an orca. This isn't just a whale issue. I've upvoted friend's replies simply to raise their reputation a bit when they are brand new. Someone is going to prevent me from doing that? If a whale wants to support an individual, they should be allowed to do it.

Abusing the system does ruin people's reputations already too. There are people and sites that track self-upvoting abusers as one example. We still should not try to control how people spend their voting power however. The lady posting the bible verse has a friend who has a lot of money in their account. It is a form of welfare and voluntary charity in that regard.

Value is subjective anyway. Who's going to decide? That's one of the beautiful things about Steemit.com. Each individual gets to decide what is valuable to them or not. It is a "free market" in that sense. We won't all agree on what is good content. There's no way to fix that issue, and it shouldn't be fixed. It is working as intended.

Yes, there are abusers, and their always will be. We should definitely keep creating initiatives to clean this place up like @spaminator, @steemcleaners, @cheetah, etc. too. Discussing this issue as you have done here also helps. Thanks!