I think he also contributed politically to some design decisions, such as originally being against perpetual debasement.
No that is clearly wrong. He had no involvement whatsoever in any of those early decisions, and probably didn't even know the project existed at that time. His "altcoin observer" post announcing his interest was more than a month after the launch, and I remember being surprised about the whole thing.
Really, you should ask questions and not make statements about these sorts of things, since you obviously lack a lot of relevant facts, sometimes getting them completely backwards.