The eos bug gives a good example of why we need our witnesses and our developers to be separate groups of people.
Eos' 21 block producers came together, developed a patch, and deployed it all within a few hours.
Think about that for a minute.
21 groups of people came together, formulated some code, and made a change to the rules of eos that altered how eos functioned.
That is known as a hard fork, if the previous version finds supporters.
All without input from investors in the broader community.
They made an exclusive conference call, changed the code, and didnt bother to ask if anybody else liked it?
Its a club, and you aint in it!
If that happened on steem, why they could come together vote out super linear rewards, our best defense against selfvoting and crap content, increase vote weight by a factor of 4, making 10 votes a day instead of 40 is much easier to abuse, end the 4 posts per day rule that diminishes rewards for more than 4 posts, and allow abusive a**holes to begin to sell the reward pool to the highest bidders!
Who knows what shenanigans could be fomented by a group willing to collude in this manner?
If that ever happened, they could build walls that the community could never scale, or that new investors would ever consider climbing.
The abusers would increase their stake at a rate that would never allow the playing field to level out.
It would be an illuminati wet dream! 
source
If they did that, lord knows how long it would take to vote out the witnesses that knowingly played along in facilitating the abuse.
How much loot could be grabbed out of authors' and curators' pockets?
It could take years to make steem attractive to the masses, again.
Hell, they could even hide accounts so that unless we can access the blockchain ourselves, we would never know about the abuse.
We would only see our rewards go to squat and be none the wiser because the hidden accounts wouldnt be on trending!
Who we elect to the top 21 is very important.
We need contrarians in there to insure that not just those backed by the abusers protect our interests.
Witnesses that put people ahead of profits.
I think we need to make a few changes to how the voting is done, too.
Downvotes gives them a black eye despite not having enough weight to out weigh the whales.
If a witness has 10k downvotes, its an f'n clue.
Expiring votes requiring revoting twice a year keep the legacy votes from perpetuating witnesses not currently active.
Think we will get any of that without devs that are not also witnesses?
Fat chance.
Think they will ever agree to double, plus one, the number of 'top' witnesses?
Come on, this is the new normal!