IMO our form of decentralized governance is very good at taking action when under attack, and it's good at keeping the every day functions going and allocating resources to developing and operating the infrastructure of the network (front ends, user applications, developer tools and such).
What we haven't managed to be good at compared to the centralized approach is prioritizing problems, determining what the cause and impact of our problems are. We also aren't able to implement a coherent strategy for Hive - we all have our ideas of what Hive should be, but as a community we're not great at collectively deciding which such strategy should be pursued and how to allocate resources to get it done. When it comes to changes to the consensus rules, it all comes down to subjective debate - we have little ability to prove if something improves or not based on data.
As far as I can tell we have gone further and done better than any other platform in terms of decentralized governance (without falling back on centralized institutions), but these limitations still seriously hinder us.
Thanks, yes, I agree. Resources and focus have been placed into the core systems in order to keep them running securely, with more user facing aspects being under-developed - ever since the days of Steemit. Leaving these aspects to dApp creators is not working since they themselves face similar challenges with the need to invest their resources into handling technicalities that keep their systems functional. Just maintaining such systems is time consuming against the backdrop of an ever evolving internet, so evolving them in significant ways requires substantial investment of time and money.
The challenges you succinctly describe here are precisely those that I intend to map out solutions for and to solve in the near future. All help is appreciated!
That's pretty easy if you kick out everyone but 50 people.