> In fairness (I'm personally not a Bitcoin supporter) from the outside, it seemed more like the problem is no one can agree on who should be pushing changes and innovation: Core Dev or the coalition of miners?

If you step back and look at any kind of "libertarian" driven project this becomes a problem. When everybody who makes something inherently distrusts authority or having anybody "in charge", you can never really build anything big. I'd say bitcoin provides good evidence that to make any big change in a system the buck always has to stop with some individual.

With nobody in charge, you'll just drift around at the same local maximum--sometimes going up a bit, sometimes going down a bit, but never moving to an even larger but different source of value.

I dunno... just a thought....