My feeling is that the only way to force change on those with the power to do so is to offer an ultimatum. That is to first make changes to the code with regards to the vote weighting and then present it to the top 20 witnesses explaining that if they do not except it that there will be a real fork in the traditional sense of the word. That is a fork like BTC/BCH where the branches both retain the original blockchain.
I don't know anything about Steemit other than what I've heard on this thread, nevertheless I'll give my opinion anyways.
I agree that there is a big problem in Steemit, but people don't like ultimatums. I think you should look for a nice way to fix the problem first. Even if it turns out there was no nice way to fix things, the fact that you tried would give you more support for an eventual ultimatum.
You could try putting the Steemit tokens of devcoiners together to form an honest whale, the devcoiners would pick someone to be a trustee. You would still only have a small whale, but once you have something then other Steemit users would join. Make a Steemit page where you describe how your whale would vote according to an equal voting of the token sharers. With at least 5% of the total Steemit tokens, you could in effect give your token holders equal voting weight to the whales, without having to change the n^2 part of the code.
In any case, you can suggest whatever bounties you want, and you could ask develCuy to use part of his up to 12 shares to fund Steemit projects you recommend.