Personally I think the system wasn't well-designed, and suffers from some of the same governance issues as the chain as a whole. To be generous, the main driver of the original design had been the top witness and may not have realized that the witness-voting had issues that were repeated with the SPS. To be cynical, he may have fully expected to have him and his friends extravagantly bankrolled with the veneer of "community" over top of it. I think the all-or-nothing stake-weighted voting in an environment where there are huge disparities in stake size makes this system function poorly (I previously floated the idea that big stakeholders could use bots to control their voting behavior to implement other approaches as a workaround). Regardless, the typical person is probably not great at figuring out what is or isn't a good project to fund, so I'm not confident it would be a good system even without the issues.

Personally I think the idea of boards, CEOs, etc., is kind of over-complicated. An alternative that might make more sense in the nearer term would be to have some proposals that pay a big chunk of SBDs to a handful of trusted community members who could then use those funds as grants for worthwhile projects. That way people who aspire to have projects funded wouldn't have to agonize over whether they could get an amorphous "the community" on board but could just appeal to some of those designated angels.

Philosophically, it might also be worth considering whether the "development" people value happening on other chains might be a soft equivalent to the "proof of work" system: people are confident enough in the value of chain X that they are willing to put real developer person-hours into it. Does "funded" development have the same effect? (It would probably be good in the sense of SBDs being used to pay for goods and services, but that's maybe a different way than people think about the benefits of people developing things for the chain).