Maybe someone can enlighten me here, as I am fairly new to steemit.

I don't see communities as a good thing at all. With a platform that is a cross between instagram and reddit, only two things will come of it.
1: Communities will just turn into "feature" pages similar to instagram. People spamming the tag in hopes they get featured, in order to gain more followers themselves. Leaving 1 or 2 people in charge of who actually gets to see content. That doesn't sound like the community based platform everyone hopes steemit will be.
2: They become like "subreddits," in "photography" will be a community, controlled by a couple mods, who decide what gets to be posted about photography, and what rules apply to those post. All I see is a group of people being able to take a certain "theme/sub" hostage. Just like reddit; "oh sorry, no blogspam," "oh sorry, no watermark," "oh sorry, I am a mod and I don't like your post for whatever reason." Affectively shutting people out of being able to get more eyes on their own content.
Let's be honest here. The whole purpose of this platform is to "blog" or create original content about certain topics, and being rewarded for doing so. Not specific people decided what get's to be posted, and what type of content should seen. That or, a battle of who gets the dominate community first, shutting others out, and then gaining ultimate power because of it.
If people are complaining about whales abusing their power now, wait till people become in charge of communities. Wait till those communities start to "sell-out," wait for the content to be on lock-down because of issues I already stated above.
I mean, hopefully these things don't happen, and again maybe my understanding is lacking, but....

Edit: I voted my comment so it might have a better chance of being answered or discussed. Thanks.