No. Bitcoin has never been centralized not even because gavin put out updates that everyone went with. Nobody was forced to adopt any new code and xrp holders are forced to eat shit when the xrp corp releases millions and millions of new coins.
Gavin could have released bitcoin code that produced new bitcoins, but had no ability to force anyone to run it. It's absurd that he would have done so, but if you go through the thought experiment, very few people run it and Gavin loses credibility. Maybe bitcoin finds a new Gavin, maybe it goes on without a benevolent dictator, maybe it dies. But it's very hard to imagine him successfully forcing everyone else to accept a change like that.
And the same reasoning applies to Ripple and XRP. Sure, we can make any change to the code we want. And we can try to get people to run it. And maybe they will and maybe they won't. In practice, we probably have a lot of power right now. We could probably do some evil at the margins for a short period of time if we wanted to, just as Gavin could have. But if we did something truly crazy, it's hard to imagine people following us.
I mean, either people care about the network or they don't. If nobody cares, then what difference does it make? If people care, why would you expect them to go along with changes that hurt them dramatically when they have a clear alternative?
There is no RCL secret source. The public source code is the source code we run. Our validators run the same code everyone else's validators runs. We hold no power to control the validators other people trust or who runs a validator.
On the other hand, we do hold an awful lot of XRP. We could, for example, crash the market for XRP by selling a huge amount in a short period of time. That would hurt us more than anyone else. And our conduct has demonstrated to date precisely the opposite -- we've worked to lock up XRP and we've discussed our plans for how we'll release XRP to the world. But, of course, we remain free to follow our own interests as we see them. That is a big difference between XRP and many other assets. If you think we will be good stewards and our plans are likely to build demand, then you will tend to expect the price to go up. If you think we will screw it up, abandon XRP, or fail for some reason, then you will tend to expect the price to go down.