Do not be confused: The fact that most of the dozens of developers choose to collaborate to build a stronger and better Bitcoin implementation than we could build alone does not make development non-distributed.

The process is Bitcoin is one that amplify the independence of developers generally, even beyond the level of open source software, -- including down to the fact that multiple developers must collaborate to produce releases (so we do not just end up with only one or two person who knows how), that any user can produce the same binaries that we do, that we do not have an auto-update process, and so on.  Many more complex features begin life in developers personal forks (which exist, though most don't make releases from them intended for the public (although Luke-Jr has for years)). Our software licensing enables developers to go off and do their own thing based on the codebase, even if the original authors strongly disagree with them.

When you say stuff like this, given the permissive open source software and development process what you're effectively saying is that developers should cooperate less and instead expend their efforts on more duplicated work.

I don't think that is a way to make Bitcoin successful. But I can think of a few parties that would benefit from that outcome...