I can’t speak directly for the Foundation, but here is my opinion about governance:
Voting isn’t the best approach. Instead, the best approach is to have multiple more or less independent teams with their own control of their own codebases for interacting with Zcash, both full nodes and wallets.
Then, users vote by using their software. If the teams disagree on future protocol evolution, the outcome depends on where the economic and political weight rests among these independent teams.
Obviously a big hurdle here is that ECC receives a portion of block rewards, and has a huge advantage over any other dev team, unless it’s funded by the Foundation, which also receives block rewards.
So, my personal opinion is that I would like to see a more level playing field for independent teams to build Zcash nodes and wallets and then users vote by choosing which products they feel support them best.
I do think polling is crucial. One issue that’s surfaced on this thread and elsewhere is that the governance council vote, the forum members positions, traders, and all the various kinds of stakeholders may want different things and we don’t have a clear picture of how many people want what. In that case I do think stake-based “polling” can help.
I actually would rather give HODLers a higher weight in such polling, so for example if you locked your ZEC for a period of time, you’d get more points in a poll, in order to protect against big traders who might take a temporary position to influence a vote but who aren’t committed on a longer time scale to Zcash’s success. What do people think of that “polling” approach? (I say polling, because I’m still imagining it would not be binding.)