Still unclear on this topic. Essentially my issue is that I know the fundamental reasons why bitcoin is trustworthy as a protocol, and why it is resistant to censorship and bad actors. I am not technically up to speed on ethereum nodes or other leading cryptos, and am under the impression (due to the DAO fork) that the dev's can unilaterally mandate a fork, without proper consensus. Is this accurate?
No, that is not accurate for Bitcoin. It may be accurate for other coins where there is only one group of devs and what they say is what everyone generally goes along with. In Bitcoin, there are many groups of developers. Furthermore, because Bitcoin is so large, in order for any change to occur (whether hard fork or soft fork), more than just the developers are needed. Miners will be needed to produce blocks that conform to the new rules. Users are needed to run full nodes that accept the new rules. There are more than just developers in Bitcoin, and the developers cannot mandate that something happen; the community must accept it.