..some of the innovations in coins like ....[snip] .... can't necessarily be coded into BTC if only because of monolithic/centralized nature of the bitcoin devs and the foundation. so there may be value there.
Just because you say so? Prove it.
Well that's not really something that you can prove or disprove. But I do agree that there is a lot of centralization around the development of BTC protocol, the Bitcoin Foundation has shown it will bow to government authority. So thought experiment: How would we go about having the bitcoin protocol adopt a tumbling blockchain, or other anonymizing features?