Yeah, I keep hearing this. But I don't think it works in practise.

Just one example: someone came up with a good idea to run a few independent mining algos in a coin (Myriadcoin does this) to get rid of 51% attack concerns. There is no way Bitcoin miners who invested millions into ASICs will agree to switch to a hard fork even if bitcoin developers release the new bitcoin code with a few independent mining algos. So basically, miners control what they think is a good idea or not, not users.