I have been trying to push the "
delegate proposal ratified by shareholder vote" model for a while now that has similar features to what you describe here.
The idea is to make delegates basic block producers only. They also produce price feeds and they put proposals up to be voted on by the shareholders. They each get paid the same basic salary for doing these tasks.
If at least 51 delegates agree to put up a proposal to be ratified by shareholders, the proposal shows up in the users' clients. Users can then either approve or disapprove the proposal (or they can just take the default neutral position). Define S = (percentage of stake approving of proposal) - (percentage of stake disapproving of proposal), and V = (percentage of stake that is not neutral on the proposal) = (percentage of stake approving of proposal) + (percentage of stake disapproving of proposal).
We define some function f(S, V). For example, f(S,V) = S - 0.15*(1-V). If N blocks have passed since the proposal was put up for ratification (say N = 8640, or 24 hours), AND f(S,V) ever becomes positive for the proposal, then that proposal becomes ratified and goes into effect.
The proposals could change many things in the way the DAC/blockchain operates. The changes to the DAC most relevant to this discussion would be paying a salary to a specific worker (any BTS account; they wouldn't have to be delegates). The proposals could hire, fire, and change the salary of workers. So there would be no need to keep the proposals active to check if the number of vetos grows above the number of votes. If people want to fire someone because they are doing a bad job, the delegates just create a fire proposal for the specific worker, and the voters are motivated to vote on that proposal to get rid of the bad worker. The dilution caps that limit how much of a salary the workers could be paid in aggregate would of course still be in place and could only be changed by majority approval.
A proper choice of the f(S, V) function will create the incentive structure similar to the one you desire where things happen unless there is clear opposition against it. With the example function I gave above, the demands on voter participation might be too strict: there would need to be 12.4 yeas to every nay with 15% voter participation. The function could be adjusted to account for larger voter apathy. For example, with f(S,V) = S - 0.02*(1-V), the proposal could pass with just
3.9% voter participation as long as there were at least three times as many approval votes as there were disapproval votes.