Hey Tuck, I agree. Good to see you BTW.
Until the power of the devs has a counterbalance we will see unilateral decisions made irrespective of what the popular consensus wants to do. This is a significant shortcoming of graphene, that it doesn't provide a tangible / provable way to poll popular opinion. One system of consensus that begins to do this is Dash, which uses a yes / no vote of the masternodes (> 4000 of them) to "poll" what that group wants to do. The masternodes are trusted entities, a much larger number than DPoS witnesses, but far short of a truly popular consensus where every user's vote directly contributes to a poll result.
If the claims of being the first censorship-resistant social media platform are to be trusted, they must be demonstrated. To do that requires decentralized control. It actually needs to be censorship-free, or at least censorship by community consensus which I don't believe steemit has yet achieved.
All blockchain projects start out as centralized, and until some tipping point is reached only the creators of it truly know what they're trying to achieve, so it's not unreasonable for them to control the direction of the project. What the threshold for that tipping point is depends on the project, but IMO it should be defined in the whitepaper, if not explicitly then at least via the metrics that will be used.
Projects conceived primarily from a profit seeking motivation may never want to relinquish a majority interest in the direction the project heads. That's not to say they ignore their users, as that is a sure way to guarantee failure.
When leadership transitions from the creators into the hands of the community is much more difficult to define for projects whose goals and motivation are more philosophical and broader than successfully earning a profit. Let me be clear - there is nothing wrong with earning a profit, in fact that is indeed a very important factor in measuring a project's success and ability to provide value to its' users.
Devs and investors who give birth to the project need to eat and also deserve compensation for the value they bring through their labors. It isn't necessarily unreasonable for them to want to retain a majority interest in how the project is managed. However, to achieve the lofty aspirations @dantheman has expressed requires control to become decentralized, and having only a few people that control it is a weakness that is easy to attack and counter-productve to those goals.