Design by committee, required for worker proposals to function in an organization, is a way to get a really mediocre and unfocused product. I think they were misguided in BitShares, and they're misguided in Steem.

Taking social problems, like "who should lead?" (and by "lead" I mean "make decisions about allocating shared/group resources") and punting on addressing them by tossing them at some "wisdom of the crowd" solution (which isn't, even; it's stake-weighted as usual, right?) isn't going to produce good results. It's just going to be the same popularity contest that witness voting is right now.

In about 1971 Jo Freeman wrote an excellent article called The Tyranny of Structurelessness that outlines the problems with organizations that have no declared structure. Structure still emerges, but it's never the one that benefits the most people. This is that same mistake being repeated. Decentralizing the development of Steem is a bad idea. It's probably also a bad idea leaving it in the hands of Steemit, Inc. Steem, surprisingly, has product-market fit, and has since before I became aware of it. The core value proposition is solid; and it has absolutely nothing to do with esoteric nerd-features like SBD, escrow, the internal market, et c.

I am convinced that with a system like this we'll see more inward-facing changes that matter only to people who are so deep into the Steem forest that they are only aware of the trees: tweaking of minutae that matter only to a tiny, tiny fraction of the shrinking active userbase. Any available resources should be focused on making Steem easier to use for the average redditor, who doesn't give two fucks about four fucks about reward curves, order books, et c.

I really hope that I'm proven wrong, but the only people with the means, motive, and opportunity to both a: successfully submit viable worker proposals and b: get people to actually fund them are, in my experience, the kind of people who know very, very little about designing compelling user-facing products. Please, prove me wrong - but until that happens, I'm going to believe that worker proposals lie on the more useless end of the spectrum of the many inventions of Larimer.

Apologies for the rather late reply on the matter; I haven't been on this website very much lately and just saw this whole "worker proposal" thing gathering steam.