I'm not a developer of Steem at all, just an early miner, witness and community member. As such I really can't comment on the development process aside from what I've seen from that perspective. The time I spend on it is based on my own initiatives to build the ecosystem, not core development. I do split my time between Steem initiatives, Monero, and some other non-crypto work (though since adding Steem to the mix, I've reduced the latter).
I can say that Steem is developed by a company which has funding from their own early mining. In terms of governance, Steem has elected witnesses who decide what consensus software to run, and we consult with the developers to give them our input, but mostly the direction is set by the developers unless witnesses give them strong feedback against the direction they are setting (which rarely happens).
Monero is community-supported and the developers are either funded by crowdfunding or volunteers. The governance is by a voting system among the core team members, ratified by the community's ability to fork the project. Since Monero was itself started as a community fork of another project, the idea of the community having this power is well-understood and prominent in the value system of Monero. The core team serves the community.
So overall it is quite different, but both seem to be working.
Thanks.
On that note, who are the core devs of Steem beyond @dantheman? Are there any? I haven't seen anything written about or talked about regarding this and its important. Monero's actually got a great "about" section that describes the people involved (even though most are anonymous, at least it refers to them by rep on forums). For Steem, publicly it appears its just Ned (non-technical) and Dan.
Steem has several other core devs including @theoretical, Valentine, Michael, James and probably some others I'm forgetting. They're all visible on the github repo and most are active on Steemit as well.