I also don't see any difference between governance on Hive and how it was undertaken prior to Hive.
I would note that enabling control of #irredeemables list to be taken by community voting via HPS requires no HF, or coding at all I am aware of. The implementation of the list is what takes code, not control of the inclusions on the list, which is undertaken on Github, not the blockchain.
Clearly such centralized codebase precludes actual decentralization, but in this case controlling the #irredeemables list through HPS rather than @themarkymark personally doing so requires no HF. I don't think he personally has been hardcoded into the code the consensus is running for that purpose.