some very interesting thoughts.
I wonder if one or some staking pools - consciously made for “poor” stakeholders - could help in this case.
Let’s say (please correct if I’m comepletely wrong on the numbers) a poor participant can permanently stake 500 ADAs. And a whale who want his project funded is going to stake 50,000,000 ADAs. The poor pool would require 100,000 delegating participants, in order to “vote down” the whales proposal.
A whale could try to infiltrate such a poor pool, which could be prevented when the poor pool is not allowing single stakes larger then 1000 ADA’s combined with some “bureaucratic” hurdles. For example, if after the first captcha confirmation a responding captcha contains a code and some random time frames within the next 7 days where the user has to confirm his stake a second time. The goal is to make it easily doable for poor stakers worried about whales, but very time-consuming for single whales
BTW: I also started a thread about the treasury/governance system some days ago and asked some questions. Feel free to comment there too: Questions about treasury system