That's another point for another post - this confusion about how voting really works.

But the problem is people trying to game the system by jumping ship to the next post that a whale votes on and people basically following these limited accounts with high SP. This leads to a lack diversity of SP distribution to the few accounts that the whales game for curation rewards, such as @dollarvigilante.

If people were to instead get rewarded for the amount of time spent on their post(s), then I'm certain that @dollarvigilante would get far fewer rewards per payout, because probably more than half the people that vote on his content don't even care to read what he has to share (they're just gaming it for curation rewards). That's not to say that @dollarvigilante 's content isn't high quality, but, rather, that too many accounts are voting purely on popularity.

If we could somehow build a system that better incentivizes reading content that we actually enjoy reading versus doing so for "popular" content and, at the same time, makes it more difficult for whales to set up "lazy bot systems" that mindlessly vote for that popular content and then get the hive following of votes behind them, then this should make for an all-around fairer and more enjoyable experience. I think that this "voting with time" idea is a step in that direction and it just makes sense - time is valuable and where/ how we spend most of our time says everything about what we truly value.