hey, i'm just following the Chief Scientist. he's telling me to upgrade to XT. no one's forcing you to follow this thread. 
Also I do not like the leaderless paradigm of Monero. I don't believe that is how innovative design in open source gets done. Open source is superior at refining existing things (e.g. Cryptonote), but it usually sucks at radical innovation. For that, you need a leader. And leaders don't work for free. They work for equity in the creation of their babies.
Here are some of my considerations:
When you have actors out there (i.e. TPTB) that can work more efficiently to influence individuals versus groups, I see not what you term "the leaderless paradigm" but rather, a distributed leadership that checks/provides redundancy against this sort of vulnerability. For instance, a common law enforcement tactic is separating suspects and interrogating them alone, as individual power is often more easily influenced versus shared. If Gavin Andressen is perceived as the most trustworthy leader on Bitcoin given the nature of his connection with Satoshi, then logically it'd make most sense to influence him first to influence the group. This is an inherent weakness in pyramid structures.
Time for collaboration/communication is how innovative open source gets done, whether it's between the neural structures in Ur brain or through a fractalized Internet. A flexible development structure leaves room for 'leaders' to contribute their worth while the system does not have to depend upon any one chokepoint so as to cause detriment to the overall effort.
With the possible achievable values in equities of stake in meritorious decentralized projects, the best developers realize that they don't need overbearing ownership in equity for that equity to be worth more than they might efficiently know how to employ in their lifetimes.