Manipulation in Bitcoin isn't as bad as it used to be. The benefit of a well distrubited market where we have plenty of large exchanges with their own market makers is that whales have to compete with other whales. Every attempt to steer the market in a different direction can be nullified pretty easily by other whales, which we have seen happen not that long ago.

In other words, whales have to carefully calculate every one of their trades, because there are always bigger whales with different plans.

Volatility on the other hand isn't that much of a negative feature, especially when you take into consideration that volatility attracts liquidity. Stocks lacking volatility hand out dividends to attract liquidity, Bitcoin does it with volatility.