All your points are technically correct and simply make sense. Yet, users (especially non-tech new users) would hope and expect the community to reward the highest quality content. The current reward system doesn't really do that. It's that gap, between the expectancy to reward quality and the reality of whale's motives and behavior that fuel emotionally driven posts about 'My post got downvoted and...' etc

Any system with incentives/rewards will create human behavior that gets rewarded. Always.