I actually talked about BBP to some friends that were interested in mining it. I did a calculation according to my data for them - the fact that they would need to buy BBP for 1000 USD in order to be able to mine with the daily profit of ~8 USD minus electricity & HW costs discouraged all of them. Part of them couldn't even afford that, another part said that it would be too risky for them (given the market cap) :-(
I was thinking about a way how we could make mining less easy for big whales, where (I'm guessing) a single person controls large amount of some spare datacenter servers. I like the idea of writing letters to orphans and having this manual work needed in order to get mining rewards, but it brings challenges for non-native English speakers. But if there were also some other ways of supporting orphans, so that people could actually choose from multiple of them an get some points for that that would count in the reward formula, it could help the "average" miners.
Also, it seems that the big whales still use temporary servers (e.g. a server that is mining for few hours and then vanishes). As we saw when we run out of Rosetta tasks, it brings challenges to BOINC infrastructure, so perhaps we could penalize miners with many cancelled/unfinished tasks or with servers with "small age"?
I'm not really sure what the actual issue is with "whales". In the end, they just bring more to the table and they are rewarded for it. They bring both computing power and also have a ("risky") investment as they're holding a large amount of BBP instead of just selling it. There's nothing that can be done against it. Anyone could take the same amount of risk and be rewarded the same? If you can't afford it, well then sorry but why would anyone make such a risky investment if there wasn't an appropriate reward for it?
If I wanted to mine bitcoin right now I would have to spend thousands on an ASIC, if I wanted to mine any other GPU coins...well I would have to drop a few grands to buy my graphic cards. One could argue that it is a less risky investment because you could reuse the GPU for a lot of coins or even sell them and that is true...but it will be way less profitable that investing into something more "risky" like BBP.
You're rewarded proportionally to the risk you're taking. If I took a bank loan or invested my savings to become a BBP "whale", I would expect to be rewarded accordingly for the risk I'm taking. You can't just expect a big reward if you're not willing to take any risk.
If the staking was removed, the existing and new "whales" will just increase the amount of processing power and it will be the same distribution % or even "worse", minus the fact that they don't have to hold BBP so that's less risky for them.