One thing that I don't think most people realize is that the "top" witnesses really don't have much power or control over the network at all. It's all in the hands of the stakeholders, which is how it should be. We pretty much can't do anything without the approval of the stakeholders who vote for us.
I think what most people realize is that a very large chunk of the stake is owned by the top witnesses. The reason for this is two-fold: 1) many of them took part in mining in the very early days and 2) if you have acquired a large stake, it makes sense to set up a witness of your own and use your stake to move it up the list so as to earn witness rewards.
Now, this is normal and acceptable as witnesses must be paid well for the sake of network security. But here's where the Achilles' heel of DPoS lies: the list of consensus witnesses is short, which leads to stake centralization over time - without additional major sources of inflation such as content rewards. The push to do away with content rewards one way or another is a very transparently self-serving move, which must be a major reason why the price hasn't been going anywhere but down in the last three years.
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