there is no reason to actually invest in Steem to become a whale
We don't really need whales here.
It's nice to have 10 people eager to buy 1 million Steem each.
But 1 million people eager to buy 10 Steem each would do the same job right as well.
But you don't have the marketing capability to get 1 million people to buy anything let alone some crypto. It's hard enough to get 1 million people to buy Bitcoin even. And even if you could somehow convince 1 million people to want to buy Steem it is not easy enough in terms of go to Robinhood or Coinbase for this to scale in that way.
Yes, I agree, my exemplification was too extreme.
Still I think for someone considering developing some blockchain application there's some good intensity to buy 100k Steem now to distribute to his 10k customers later.
And when I do put this persons hat on, last thing I want is "to compete for rewards", instead I would prefere pure PoS