I agree with your analysis, I was actually going to write similar article myself – but now that you did it, I don't have to.
Although I still think that DPOS is quite good system, better than most blockchain governance models. Problem is the quality of shareholders. There are too many BTS owners who don't like the current system, but instead of selling everything, they just try to stop all development.
Bitshares is like a startup company that sold too much shares to investors. Now they are not on the same page anymore. Too much conficting interests, too much ignorance, too much different views, etc. Because of this, nothing gets done. People start to abandon the community, developers are not interested, new money isn't flowing in...
My suggestion how to fix Bitshares is to launch a new chain and sharedrop it to people who have shown that they love Bitshares 2.0 system and willing to work for it. And of course Non-transferable BTS an BitBTS would solve a lot of problems, too.
I used to think this way as well, but on second thought I'd say the quality of voting people is nothing we can do about. The only way out is to design the incentive scheme in a such a way as to promote those who are better decision makers than the average shareholder. But I agree, it's a big challenge in a stake-based voting system, and I don't know how to do it. It seems to me that copying the corporate structure of power is the only way to go. On some level it saddens me to reach this conclusion but maybe this is the truth we need to face.
One way to solve low quality shareholder problem is obvious but not talked about (at least I haven't seen): let DAO have a right to confiscate shares from shareholders. If there was a bad situation where everything has stopped and nothing gets done, easiest solution would be, of course, to destroy the opposition. After the shares from opposition have been confiscated and redistributed/destroyed, DAO can work again.
In reality confiscation would be used very rarely, if ever. It would be enough if shareholders were aware of that possibility. Those who disagree would sell their shares before any bad conflict would arise.