The good dictator question. Yes, I freely admit that if you have an excellent and deeply empowered leader, then your movement has the potential to accomplish great things; however, you are effectively betting the house on the brilliant and character of one person or a small group of strongmen. This bet is never sustainable historically. Either the leader dies, retires or gets corrupted.
Therefore, it makes sense to invest time and resources into a governance structure that is in some way anchored with checks and balances. The challenge is always how do you execute in a very competitive environment with these measures slowly down your agility, ability to adapt and decisive decision making?
I'd argue that for cryptocurrencies with billions of dollars at stake of token value and infrastructure, it is actually imperative that a disciplined and deliberate process be taken. I'd also argue that you need to have solid principles and a well understood social contract embedded into your decision making process. These requirements don't necessarily infer that you cannot be agile or adaptive. Rather, they simply have such an effort orders of magnitude more difficult and imperfect at best.
There is some really good literature on the topic: https://falkvinge.net/files/2013/04/Swarmwise-2013-by-Rick-Falkvinge-v1.1-2013Sep01.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starfish_and_the_Spider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy as examples. For ETC and other cryptocurrencies, I'd love to see some adoption of these ideas as a further differentiator to the cult of personality, centralized leadership some cryptocurrencies currently enjoy.
Caesar crossed the Rubicon, then later was assassinated.
However, I will argue that everything dies. And it is better to live and die, than to not have lived. So greatness may require great leaders, but we do hope in their wake, their ideas flourish decentralized and/or institutionally.
Yep, really covered my question well and the potential deeper problem of Kingship :) will read up on material. Cheers