There is a major hole in your ad hominem and conspiracy theory. Gavin willfully gave up his power in Core out of principle to further distribute development.
Great leaders do not desire power. He gave up his leadership position in Core out of principle only to have Core turn against him to disallow the changes he wanted to implement. This reminds me of the story of Cincinatius, who was a roman dictator who also freely laid down his power, this should be considered admirable.
I should not have even responded to such a silly post, however that was to glaring of a fault in your reasoning not to point out.
He didn't give up anything, he never had "control" over the Bitcoin Core code. No one does.
In practice Wladimir had been the actual maintainer of the repo even before Gavin's announcement.
The announcement stemmed from Gavin's inactivity in terms of contributing code & ideas, nothing more. He more or less realized the project & state of the technology was now out of his league.
He gave control over to Wladimir, who is now the maintainer of the Bitcoin Core repo, before that Gavin was the maintainer of the Bitcoin Core repository. I can agree that ideally and theoretically no one can or should be able to control Bitcoin the protocol. However the Bitcoin Core repository can be controlled by a single person, presently Wladimir is the person who has the final say over what is merged into the code of Bitcoin Core. This gives him a position of great influence considering that Core is still considered to be the "reference client" for many people. In political thought influence is a definite form of power, this is the power that I think should become more distributed and decentralized, I also think that this is inline with the original ethos of Bitcoin.