Decred dev funding and governance mechanism are brilliant features, and the airdrop bootstrapped a community of enthusiastic supporters, and staking via tickets system keeps a lot of coins locked up earning income for holders. The whole decred design is very well thought out, that's why guys who messed up the airdrop are still upset.
Blockchain governance's "brilliance" is not yet proven in my opinion. Give an angry, and motivated minority enough reasons, and they will fork, and the chain will split.
That's another great feature Decred was designed against. It's very expensive for a minority to maintain a working fork of Decred. The protocol just doesn't allow for it like, e.g., Bitcoin does.
...that's not to say a motivated minority couldn't just go and copy pasta the github repo and release their "fork" that way: but there are different implications for that kind of deployment.
Don't you understand? NOTHING might stop a minority from forking of, and cause a split in the chain if they disagree with what's changed in the protocol. Changes in the protocol that
be removed anymore.
What until Decred gets its own scaling debate.