My witness votes have been in place, and have been "adjusted," since... about June, 2017 - just as soon as I joined SteemIt and educated myself about voting for witnesses. The only question is, does my voting have any effect? I honestly don't know that it does, one way of the other.
Why have these "serious whales" allowed @haejin to exercise this, "golden parachute" option - for the last few months? If they were so "serious," wouldn't they have stopped @haejin somewhere around $20K, instead of $200K ??? Or, could they have been 10 times more "serious" about exercising their resposibility to keep SteemIt a fair place?
Is there anything put into place to address the next "rape of the rewards pool" which is almost certainly in planning or has already launched? Or, are there already thousands of similar situations already going on, which nothing is being done to correct? Or, is @haejin just the most glaring example of somebody who has successfully "out-gamed" the whales who are already gaming us?
If self-promotion is "against the rules," why don't the Witnesses change this situation for everyone, ensure a "one person, one account" system, and clean things up? Or, did Dan Larimer leave the SteemIt platform because there are "unfixable" problems that are already hard-coded into the SteemIt blockchain, and he's going to try and do a better job with EOS and SteemIt 2.0?
Currently, Witness vote weight is all about SP. I do recall @ned mentioning about changing it. You can see the overall layout here.
http://www.steemreports.com/witness-voters/
The report gets rid of the proxies I believe, so it's basically how the SPs weight all distributed among the top Witnesses. The website also has sections for the lower 50s, etc.
Also note that I believe a significant of Steemians DO NOT vote.
I can see that I still have a lot to learn, and my questions are many. The only real pathway for me seems to be, "Keep Swimming, and Be Careful."
And really, most of your other questions can be found by visiting @paulag's blog for her stats. In short, there are upcoming @haejin's and many tiny circlejerk rings.
I get daily messages from Steem.chat about vote for vote.
As for @dan, the history is carved into the blockchain, you can read about why he left.
As for why did whales, et al wait? Again, Witness voting distribution should have answered most of that question.