It is fairly clear to me Zcash has been essentially captured both in coin allocation (now with voting rights!) and in development efforts (follow the money, watch the actions).
Most leading organizations and thus the project itself now lack credible neutrality, relying instead on a thin screen of plausible deniability, but dominated by big capital forces wherever the light shines. This was largely illuminated by the ZODL leaving the ‘public-good’ umbrella of Bootstrap and accepting funding by VCs and elite oligarchs - who also overlap with Shielded Labs funders.
Even ZCG is now unanimously funding ZODL-spawned lobby organizations for large amounts, with board members from both Zcash Foundation and ZODL investor firms who also fund mass surveillance companies - in less than two weeks of the proposal opening, with no public conversation or comment around the decision.
I don’t think there is really a way to change course anymore, with the decisions that have been made by a very small group of people collaborating in private, and revealing only obscured bits at a time, later (for example, the now open opposition to the Dev Fund, and the ‘cypherpunk’ corporation’s mining fleet, now the largest in the world).
See my posts: Independence, Threads I, Hazards I, which were my humble efforts to be up to date when published. I have a bit more to post, soon which fills out the picture more.
But essentially the present circumstance is not “let’s have more stakeholders, that would be decentralized!” it’s really “you never had any decision power, but we’d like to keep that idea alive, despite recent glaringly obvious counterexamples.”
The question then is - if you’re not one of the few deciders - what can you do?