The result of this analysis should be used so that decisions with regard to design or upgrading can be data driven rather than by way of a top down command and control.
In a way, I think it could make matters worse, because people are still under the influence of others, but in addition to that we indirectly make everyone's opinion count. Which magnifies the problem with public sentiment and popularity cults.
In DPOS people who don't do enough research are less likely to vote, which is not a bad thing. You still get bunch of people who think they know enough, but are actually just blind followers. But at least you don't include all the people who don't care enough about the network, but nevertheless have opinions formed by others.
Also there might be stakeholders, who have opinions, but are wise enough to understand that their knowledge is not complete. You don't want to include their opinions into decision making process as well.
Either way, thanks for a thought provoking article.
Which means DPOS evolves into technocracy? That might work okay for narrowly focused decisions on technical matters where clear objective measurements can be had but this does not work so well for governance in the true sense.
Well, everyone is still free to vote, so it's up to the people to prevent it from evolving into technocracy. Fortunately, people can learn, and once they see the consequences of non-voting they can easily start fixing the problem by voting.
Which cannot be said about most of other existing protocols. Where it's hard for average user to have any positive effect on the network, because he has to dedicate hardware to participate in consensus process.
I think that non-voting problem in DPOS is way smaller compared to problems with centralization in other existing protocols. I'm not saying DPOS is perfect, just pointing out that other protocols have even bigger problems.