Which means either he is fooling (possibly himself and) you, or the coin MUST BE controlled top-down and is thus centralized. Thus handed on silver platter for take over by the authorities in the future.

Either you have decentralized protocol or you have top-down control.

If the protocol is decentralized it means no one can decide to change it any more, unless they can convince a majority of the mining hash processing power to switch. Since ASICs have orders-of-magnitude hash processing power advantage, then they won't agree of course. Even if ASICs are just launched, existing GPU or CPU miners will be resistant to changes. So you must then maintain top-down control over pools or somehow force all miners to switch.

I explained this to bytemaster months ago when he proposed a similar strategy for BitShares.

This is also why you won't see any drastic changes to Bitcoin any more.