RE: A proposal about proposals
Here's an idea that potentially looks more decentralized: a person with a good reputation in the community can create a proposal that's something like "I want to offer a dev bounty for [insert needed dev support here]". The proposal gets funded, they accumulate the funds in their wallet, and they just hold it there until they're ready to pay out the bounty. An aspiring dev (if they exist) then doesn't have to face the nebulous "how do we convince people to pay us for this?" question, they have the face the potentially more tractable "what do I need to do to satisfy X's bounty?" question.
This might give the unilateral decision-making clarity of a CEO, but it doesn't have to look like the CEO of the whole blockchain, it's just one person among many running their own DAO-funded project.
Yeah, I've thought about that as a possibility, too. It's definitely a reasonable idea. Along the same lines, another possibility I have considered would be for an influential stakeholder to publish a "Request for Proposal" (RFP) in order to attract someone who could fulfill a need to submit their own proposal.
The drawback to the bounty is that you have to trust someone to hold the funds (unless it's mixed with some sort of escrow/multisig arrangement). The drawback to the RFP is that the person publishing the RFP may not be able to guarantee that any proposal would be approved.