You keep saying “the panel had no effect on the outcome” and that just isn’t true or fair. The panel questions had some limited scope, and was mainly oriented at setting priorities for the foundation itself. I think what you’re getting at is that the panel didn’t have an item like “the company must switch pow to deprecate asics immediately”. I sympathize with that, but that wasn’t what it was for. Votes carried out by/for the foundation will have increasing impact as: a) the foundation has additional developer staff including core devs that could maintain a fork independent of the company, b) has rights over the trademark, c) if the voting process itself is seen as legitimate, resistant to Sybils/Invaders, and representative.
In any case, the foundation will still just be one entity, and I don’t think it will either 1) operate entirely by community vote, or 2) be fully responsible for the network or development activities either. You don’t need anyone’s permission to form a dev team and build a fork and promote it (trademark notwithstanding). Everything else governance-wise we’re doing is meant to simplify and smooth that process, but that’s the baseline.