Are we still paying royalty to CN developers? Is the royalty compulsively?
Yes, and not really. I think if you solo mine, then you can turn off the 1% donation, but if you mine at a pool, then I think they mostly have it turned on. It's really not clear, and I've asked for more information previously, and was told to read the source code. It would be nice if there was more than a vague sentence or two about miners voting on dev bounty for non-c++ programmers.
Pools could be adapted to take miners' donation votes, and vote in their blocks on average the same as their miners vote. The effect of each individual miner would of course be proportional to each miner's hashrate.