No it's not better to have a single leader... You were not here for the STEEM/HIVE fork. At least this account wasn't. One person can do more damage than a small group. At least the witnesses still had the desire of some kind of decentralization, but the 'ninja-mine' from the original Steem launch (which is what funded the DHF after the fork) was used to completely take over the chain with sock puppet witnesses. That was because he took over only 1 front end (which was the main one), but still he had the stake, then used his influence with CZ to get Binance to use their CUSTOMER FUNDS to attack the chain and help JS take over. So, no, one dictator over a chain is not better.
If you are going to have one evil or the other, I would at least rather have small groups because at least in Hive's case, some do actually care about decentralization, but they just want as much for themselves as they can get so they can dump on the rest of the market and earn for basically doing nothing.
I have been around for a while.