Now for the rest of your post, have you heard about a tech patent called AsicBoost by any chance? Its creators claim that it's able to increase efficiency of bitcoin ASICs by around 20%, it's something that sounds good in theory but given that it's patent pending and has a potential to dominate mining, devs are looking into making it irrelevant. So yeah, it's already in the interest of developers to protect mining from such things.
AsicBoost is not a claim it is real and open to public (thanks to the dev geeks) but it can not help as the big miners put orders with exclusive private rights on new chips, it is the way they do business.
My proposal: people should establish and control big mining firms in a revolutionary new type of investment and institution backed by the bitcoin infrastructure. Why? To protect this infrastructure from the prehistoric dinosaurs.