The "picture" might look different because your fabricate it to fit your twisted view of how you believe it should work.
Here's how the decision process unfolds in reality.
Tier 1
Network peers (nodes)
Bitcoin holders
Tier 2
Miners
Tier 3
Exchanges
Tier 4
Everyone else (merchants, payment processors, consumers, redditards, Fidelity & other banking parasites)
TLDR; if you don't have the support of the network peers and the "bitcoin rich list" your fork goes the way of XT which goes the way of Stannis at Winterfell -> #REKT
There should be no tiers in the decision making process. The consensus should be formed by the economic majority in the form of running full nodes and mining. You are wrong in maintaining this arbitrary tiered ordering of the decision making process, this does not reflect the reality today and this should not be how decisions are made either.