All open source software has leadership whether you recognise it or not. The question is, is this leadership more of a risk than it is a benefit. An anarchic leadership reduces the risk of things changing too fast that only large corporations can keep up. But it also increases the risk of paralysis and implementing ideas that almost everyone agrees is best, because no one has the power to pursue anything decisively. We think our way of doing things allowed us to design things from first principles and have a very minimalist and well reasoned architecture. If you listen to us more often, you might be convinced that we are very protective of the simplicity of the core protocol, pushing most of complexity to higher layers or optional APIs, exactly because we want to build one foundational layer on top of another, as opposed to spontaneous house of cards.