The benefit of writing a ZIP is that a ZIP specifies exactly how you think things should work. Instead of saying “don’t do X”, a zip should say “do exactly Y.”
This kind of clarity is very helpful. One problem with forum discussions is that objections to how things are often don’t do much to articulate a specific alternative, and so they go round and round in an endless spiral without achieving anything. People may have an idea of what “do exactly Y” should look like in their heads, but they spend so much time on “don’t do X” that exactly what Y is can be unclear.
I will give an example: quite a while ago I wrote a post proposing a mechanism for market-based determination for dev fund allocation: Loan-Directed Retroactive Grants. I still think it’s a good idea; it’s a possibility that’s downstream of figuring out a mechanism for disbursement of the dev fund. I do wish that the community had been able to think about disbursement independent of governance questions, because muddling the two makes it harder for people to make informed choices.
For the current polling, I did at least try to “factor out” the mechanism proposals from the governance ZIPs, but I don’t know whether people have even read that bit: Draft ecc-lockbox-disbursement: Deferred Dev Fund Lockbox Disbursement