As I said on other of my replies, yes. It is. I wouldn't be using any platform which are showing obvious clues that are fully centralized. I think one of those would be BearShares, where all witnesses are controlled by one unique entity.
That's no different to Steem-Engine. The only reason people are trusting them is because who are the developers behind it. And they are really trustfull people. Steem Keychain is the best thing ever happened to Steem since the Genesis Block.
But the fear is still over there. Sure. Just to say something possitve, I clamed yesterday my PAL tokens. And I will be using PALnet quite often, almost in a daily basis. But I don't like them to say they are what they are not.
Could even DAO(with ENG) it to give it more decentralization
Another interesting non-feature is that they don't allow for people to publish any smart contract. And that was a very smart decission. Steem-Engine contracts are written in JavaScript, which could be insecure. I am not saying that currently deployed Steem-Engine smart contracts are insecure.
Of course, an upgrade on the platform on the smart-contract side to facilitate the process to take decissions would help. But I don't see it helping in the decentralization..
What they could do is allowing any node to look for the consensus and, if it was the case, splitting the side-chain in case of differences on those blocks -the ones on the side-chain, which are just redundantly built from data stored on the Steem blockchain-.
That still leaves us with the centralization issue. That of course could be fixed by allowing any node to create the transaction which modifies the data on the Steem blockchain, and then, wait for the consensus between Steem-Engine nodes to arrive.
Until then, Steem-Engine is just a platform which stores data on th eSteem blockchain and allows other nodes to validate it without any possibility to stop trusting Steem-Engine side-chain node.