With regards to 1, definitely. I could see them making a multi-hundred thousand dollar investment in Steem Power instead of investing in as much community management and recruitment required when trying to get experts to contribute content for free, on a deadline. I hear you on the legally ambiguous nature of it and that being a risk.

And as for 2), I'm not sure why they'd be subject to the whims of other whales. On their own platform they'd curate whatever content they wanted displayed, so the whales voting would have no impact on their ability to show content they wanted. The rewards for the authors would be jumpstarted by the publisher's Steem power enabled votes, and if additional whales voted, great! But if not, then there's still upside from other platform voters. If the content is great then theoretically the Steem protocol and incentives should do their job and the writer will get adequately rewarded over time. If rewards are solely dependent on whales' votes, then Steem protocol has a bigger problem.