smalloranges I agree with your description of a public chain. Many other blockchains are public too like Tron, Zilliqa, EOS, EThereum, and eventually all those blockchains will be so busy and used that they will all become autonomous. But while the project is being governed by a corporation, it should be the goal of the corporation to increase awareness and PR, and have a marketing campaign around the project, so that once it is fully in the spotlight, than the governing body can take a step back gradually and give more power to the community. Kind of like Decred has done.
It’s important to know also that the crypto space and blockchain industry was a place for cypherpunks and geeks in the early early days, but it is not the case anymore. It is now being run by corporations, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs seeking to generate profits, business minded people. Even developers who have great ideas for dapps look for the platform that will generate them the most profit and will give the most exposure to their dapp. I believe that was the ultimate goal of Da Hongfei as a business person when he transitioned from Antshares to NEO, all those business strategies he applied made NEO very popular, and despite their tech issues they still have communities of developers in geographical locations developing big dapps, DEX’s, virtual machines for dapps, etc….So possibly when Testnet is complete and mainnet is live, we should have a strong marketing campaign with the help of big names, similar to Edith Yung in the early nebulas days, to help give us a nice boost.