Active, encouraging and supportive whales are awesome and extremely important for token distribution and to have a healthy platform. A bunch of wealthy accounts are selfish and greedy though, so they are (or have been) using their stake only to grow themselves more and more. That is bad for token distribution and for the entire platform in the long haul, except for when those people decides to sell and quit.
It would obviously be a lot faster to grow into a larger account with whales supporting anything- and everything you post and that would ultimately give you a superb opportunity to spoon-feed other accounts as well.
However, each token that is distributed is good, so whale-vote or not doesn't matter in the long haul because each vote from anyone with some amount of stake will be worth something. That's why it's important to stake & grow.
RE: What Is LeoFinance Without Whales? (Anything?)