Your crowdfunding argument does not work because a commitment to pay by sponsors is itself valuable consideration. It is used by the developer to backstop development and reduce risk (and can be used in other ways, such as to support raising capital from others).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration#Option_contracts_and_conditional_considerationI'm also not sure that the definition of crowdfunding necessarily means the developer doesn't get the money until the project is complete. If that's what you mean you should be clear on that, but from an investment contract point of view, it probably doesn't matter.
You are correctly pointing out that making a coin that is not yet mostly finished
I guess this is yet another gray area but I'm not really sure what "mostly finished" means here.
If it has all features appears to be "done" but it turns out to crash such that no one other than the original developer can or will fix it then everyone is going to lose all their money. So the developer's efforts or lack thereof may still be critical. I guess that is a market value question too. If the developer says "I won't fix it if it breaks" then what will the ICO price be vs. the case where the developer will fix it? I think very, very different, which argues for the importance of the developer's efforts even after launch, but who knows I might be wrong.
remove things from the protocol that force users to rely on the managerial control of the core devs, such as that forced hard fork every 6 months
There is nothing in the protocol for that. If no further updates are released (or if users don't install the updates), nothing will happen after six months. It will just keep going forever (assuming people continue to use it and it doesn't crash). The idea of the six month window is to continue to add them on a rolling basis with updates, so no one is surprised. (Off topic for this thread though, if you want to discuss it you know where the Monero thread is.)