In the case of LTC it may be that they already went past the point where they would need organized development and promotion and may just continue to spread based on word of mouth, momentum and network effects. I don't believe that is the case but that is a possibility.
LTC has organized development, but it is more focused on incremental improvements and maintenance. I'm not an LTCer so I may be misstating this, but I think what they would say is that they have past the point where they need major initiatives on new features and governance to manage those initiatives, because the essential properties of the asset are already defined. The normal essentially-voluntary open source development model which has given us great operating systems, database, compilers, web servers, network infrastructure, etc. and runs the whole damn
internet world at this point works just fine for this approach, and it seems to be working fine for LTC too.
Let's not assume that just because BTC
specifically can't seem to get its shit together (likely for its own project-specific reasons), voluntary open source financial core infrastructure can't or won't work and we all need to start creating currency-corporation-hybrids with masternodes and governance.
As for investing, the distinction between a currency or native asset and a corporation is important and too easily glossed over. You can invest in gold, and most who buy gold are investing, but there is no governance and you get no voting rights. You don't even get voting rights, nor a say in "governance", if you have 1000 ounces of gold! If you want voting rights, you can buy shares in gold-ecosystem companies, but that is distinct from buying gold itself. Importantly,
people decide for themselves which role they want, and people with no interest in being part of the machine aren't effectively charged a fee/inflation for sitting out (as is the case in Dash).
Corporations do of course need governance and voting because the active managers of the assets of the company are separate from the passive owners (principal-agent problem), not because it is an investment. A currency or asset, in and of itself, does not need governance and voting.
There is at least one project in cryptocurrency whose organizers seem to have understood this concept far better than Dash's. Sia has are two tokens, one for shares in the project (which earns royalty dividends from some forms of network activity) and another,
separate token for currency purposes. The first token was 100% premined, like a corporation, and then nearly all sold via crowdfunding to raise money for development. (I probably would have sold less of it up front but I'm sure they had their reasons.) The currency token is simply fair mined (there was a tiny premine of <1 day of blocks -- not sure why they even did that, but maybe for technical reasons) without all the extra baggage of massive premine/instamine, voting, governance, etc. that is no interest whatsoever to users of a currency. (I don't know a lot about the project so this is not an endorsement of anything other than their clearheaded understanding of the share/coin distinction.)
Dash to me seems not quite sure of what the hell it want to be. With one foot in each of these distinct roles, it is able to serve neither particularly well (and indeed is trying to claim that an "accidental" instamine created this wonderful hybrid structure, so it is now a feature, but it looks a lot more like rationalization to me).