I did read about the Virie market which will be a decentralized exchange system for cryptos to escape the corporations' influence. I don't know if "to this day no developer has been capable of creating an exchange that is popular with investors", but if there were any, their initiative was not successful. In that regard, I think that Virie has potential to revolutionize the exchange system.
There are some good decentralized exchanges out there but they are not popular, most of them have volumes which are very low compared to centralized exchanges, I have not used them all but I used the waves exchange a few months ago and its daily volume was something like 300k dollars which for an exchange is very low, but there are at least 10 new decentralized exchanges being developed at the moment so we can only wait and see if any of those projects becomes popular.
Why do you think that decentralized systems are not very popular? Could it be that some powerful people are pulling the strings behind the scenes to prevent them from emerging?