What does this even mean? "independent devs doing it". Dependent on what/whom? If you'd had 100 variants of the original Satoshi client all being developed and bug fixed separately and 100 variants of the mining software all being developed and bug fixed separately then we'd have had many more hardforks by now, with no-one really knowing anymore which is the true bitcoin. Do you go by the first version of the client which allowed anyone to give themselves a billion (well, a lot) bitcoins? Or some arbitrary version someone developed based on that? It simply wouldn't work. Bitcoin needs a majority client in order to not hard fork, and therefore in this sense, it can never be decentralised. The developers of this majority client will always have the power and can make decisions to change what bitcoin is whenever they like. For example, let's say they decide to increase the blocksize from 1MB to 10MB. Who's going to stop them? The users downloading bitcoin-qt? I suspect not. Most people just download it and use it without caring what changes are going on. Yes, we were supposed to be able to vote with our feet, but the people who actually do that are usually in the minority and so will lose.