Every pool owner should be running their own node and not rely on anyone. Otherwise, it is a recipe for disaster. I believe you know that.
Yes "pool owner" but what I was describing is "pool node" which acts something like an SPV client where it would only need to acquire certain pieces of information and doesn't need to hold the complete blockchain, if every miner needs their own node then the project will fail right out of the box.
Bisq was an example of a DAO that works in practice. You can remove mandatory Tor from the equation, use location-based algorithms and you have improved latency significantly.
An interesting idea.
I don't know if we're envisioning the same thing. The point of this DAO would be to elect representatives which will be responsible for broadcasting the block headers to the miners. As far as I understand, by design, PPS requires miners to agree on a single block header. That can't happen if the network is completely peer-to-peer; there needs to be an entity which will broadcast the unique block header, and the rest of the miners will only have to verify it comes from that entity.
PPS is just a "payment structure" it doesn't have any unique aspect in regards to how blocks are constructed or handled, also, miners don't need to have to agree on a single block header, in fact, every miner hashes unique block header due to the fact that each nonce is different, the only thing that needs to match across all miners would be the coinbase transaction, it's how centralized pools know which share is "worth paying for" and which share isn't.
Representatives will be the main operators, as pool owners are currently in centralized pools. Governance proposals can be later on made by any stakeholder.
In this way, regular miners will not need to run full nodes. It can be as simple as an upgrade to their current software.
That sounds like a good idea, the "representatives" would need to vote/decide which share is valid since any unfair player can submit shares to the pool which contain a coinbase transaction that pays to their own address and thus would receive rewards for the work which was never intended to benefit the pool.