The primary question of decentralization is ultimately that of how to distribute decision-making power. One option that is available in the future design of lockbox disbursement mechanisms is definitely to divide the lockbox into multiple portions, with distinct sets of keyholders. Under such a mechanism, the 5-member ZCG committee could be one such set of keyholders. This approach is one that the protocol engineers have discussed: it’s the bottom-center option in the table at Notes on deferred dev fund proposals - HackMD
The question at hand is: does the community potentially want to try out several different grant disbursement mechanisms in parallel? One slice of funds could be disbursed by the 5-member ZCG committee, another could be disbursed by @joshs’s proposed Zcash Funding Bloc. The question that arises for me there is: do we have sufficient resources in the ecosystem to run more than one of these? What happens when a grantee applies for grants from multiple slices, and is there a risk that in that situation there’s a “chicken” dynamic where each slice expects the other to fund a grant? One potentially interesting approach would be if there were separate “proactive grant” and “retroactive grant” slices, but I’m a little wary here; I can’t reason through all the incentives in play.
In general, I think that introducing too much complexity into the dev funding disbursement process is something we should be wary of, but it’s good to think through these sorts of possibilities.