You can't change acquisitive people, but you can make the tipping mechanism unsuitable for profiteering by them. Today the whales can cast a vote worth 100 Steem, and sell that vote for say ~60 Steem (not an example. I've never bought a vote, and have no idea what they actually cost). If their votes were only worth 1 Steem, selling them would be far too much trouble for the miserable return on their time it cost them to sell them.

Whales should be seeking capital gains, rather than extracting rewards from the pockets of creators. The rewards mechanism is indeed broken, as @clayboyn says. While I'd prefer curation rewards were just eliminated, @edicted is more right than am I when he says creators should be able to set a curation reward at their sole option. I think curation rewards discourage human judgement of quality from being the basis for casting an upvote - actual curation, and instead substitute ROI as an incentive to cast a vote. The potential financial return from casting a vote has nothing at all to do with the quality of the content, and is actually counterproductive to encouraging content of high quality.

Even so, curation payola will exist, on or off chain, and so it's better that it's on chain IMHO.