Excellent point. Indeed, I and others have said many times on this forum that ECC should explain its strategy and plans going forward. Several of the proposals explicitly include this element. I think it’s healthy to think of this as a “grant application”, to be judged either by the community as part of the Dev Fund decision, or by a higher-level governing body (in the proposals that have one).
As you already recognize, ECC does have a special role and track record, making flexibility and discretion easier to justify. Still, I would agree that many of its activities could have been funded by deliverable-oriented grants. The difficulty is: grants awarded by whom? The only body we have with the requisite structure and expertise is the Zcash Foundation, and for the sake of decentralization, we probably don’t want to put ECC’s funding completely at the discretion of the Zcash Foundation. And so we’re forced to compromise on this point, whether by giving ECC a carte blanche to execute its “grant proposal”, or by instating key-performance-metrics consensus mechanisms for incentivization (as in my idea, that got integrated into @acityinohio’s proposal).
Neither of these special circumstances arises for the hypothetical new teams, so ECC’s situation does not reflect on whether those should receive fellowship/carte-blanche funding.