Let's admit it, DPoS isn't ideal to fund development. At least not as good as Dash's masternodes
How is Dash's governance and proposal funding system better? I'm actually curious, because I haven't had time to look into it yet. On a very quick inspection I didn't see anything novel or that stood out to me (when I compare to what BitShares already has). Keep in mind, I am talking technicals here. Maybe Dash stakeholders are blessed without an anti-dilution camp holding them hostage. But that has nothing to do with the technology.
That doesn't mean BitShares governance systems are great. I have issues with it which I have talked about here and here. And I have some additional ideas (in drafts or even still in my head) for how I would like to see the worker system change to provide greater certainty to those getting paid who got elected. It's not great to get your worker elected only to worry everyday whether your worker is being paid or not because of vote fluctuations.
But the bigger issue is, could we get stakeholder consensus to implement such a large change. Probably not.
Dash doesn't have any anti-dilution camp and that is why they are doing a lot better at the moment. I made a post a few months ago explaining how different crypto DAO/DAC work, and despite the fact they have a 13% inflation, the main problem they have, is how to fund all the awesome projects they have... If they could fund more proposals trust me, they would. At the moment they are about implement contracts on the blockchain, so that people don't run into the same problems as we've run into, like one day you are paid, the other you are not.
But let me be more clear as to why Dash's model is better :
1) You must have 1000 Dash in order to vote and run a masternode, which gets about 9-10% APR. So it is people with a relatively good stake and people that are more interested in seeing Dash grow.
If you could get 10% APR and you were risking that much money, would you not try to make things work? Because there are no proxies, wouldn't you be more interested to find out about the developments? If you have bothered to create a masternode, wouldn't that mean that you are already a bit more technical and willing to get involved? It isn't the speculator or the average Joe that vote via the masternode mechanism.
2) Less voter apathy because of the incentives. Apart from the apathy, it doesn't make much sense for people to sell their Dash and leave the project after they get such good returns. In BitShares, the voting shares don't get any reward for their contributions.
3) Because your collateral is hard-locked (doesn't move), it is hard for people to can't manipulate your vote, by using your stake.
4) The voting is more anonymous as all masternodes have the same collateral, as well as due to the inbuilt privacy it has.
5) It would be very hard for exchanges to vote, as they would have to create many masternodes and vote with them, something that wouldn't go unnoticed.
Obviously many of the problems are not exactly problems of DPoS, but of the existing implementation in BitShares. I agree with your first commend on steemit, but I can't open the second one.
Without voting incentives, proper contracts, the current merger dilution, ability of exchanges to vote etc, our worker voting mechanism is useless. That's why I strongly suggest to do a Coin Offering via a hard fork. We are really stuck and we can't move.