One thing, though, a lot of projects with long gradual token unlocking are facing a situation where their token were stuck at one price because once the token price goes up, an unlock happen and "flooded" the total supply. It triggers a panic sell and price goes back down. And, this happens over and over. Departing from this argument, wouldn't it be better to sum those unlocking stages into smaller waves? Although the smaller waves means a bigger amount of token "flooding" the market.
The distribution of $BOND is happening in waves just like you say. But i understand what you are talking about. Even with this gradual unlocking, with almost all projects a stage comes when speculators are holding a lot of coins and just waiting to sell the news. The team cannot avoid speculators holding it or trying to take profit. This is unfortunately the case with most of DeFi right now and the first priority is 100X returns and not the project.
The strength of any project is thus a community of people that actually understands and cares for the product and not just for the return. The BarnBridge team is looking to launch products which will actually democratize risk management which has been the niche for established players till now. That is a humungous but worthy target. Most people are too short-sighted to see opportunities in front of them. This is why that despite the efforts to democratize, you only end up with a very few enthusiasts at the top.
I think that is just the natural course of thing. Most projects try but they cannot do much about it. The other problem is the "Rich getting richer" syndrome. Finding a solution to this is pretty much the "holy grail" of democratization.