Dash doesn't "pull together funds," 10% of its monthly block reward is earmarked to fund any proposal approved by the masternodes.

"Alt coin" is a nice propaganda term from Bitcoin maximalists that makes you think that Bitcoin is actually a superior project. It took over a year to arrive at a scaling solution that does effectively nothing in the real world. Lightning isn't even a solution; it has limited applicability considering how people actually spend money and how merchants want to be paid, and still needs to interact with a stone-age blockchain that can't handle any real transaction volume. Consider that Visa and Mastercard regularly see volumes of 3-4k transactions/second in the form of single purchases from multiple merchants. Lightning sounds cool for opening a tab at a bar, but it's good for very little else.