@yossir you cant mix fair community voting as we have it here (every participant can give his voice with a vote to a question the community decided it is important to vote about) with "democracy" in our mordern world where yout vote a colour (party) and then they will rule for around 5 years and do decissions for you (mostly influeneced from other things but that would be a long topic).
so our todays system should not even be called democracy as they have nothing to do with it.
elastic is not just some individuals who made a small donation, everyone had the chance to participate it had a ultra fair timeline so we all have been same and people took a big risk during that time to dont know where the project will go to.
so in my opinion its much more fair (and maybe in future even better with a voting system that is more advantaged) to let the community decide what direction we want to go.
I think that we are bit offtopic but yet I will try to explain my point of view in very short way.
I strongly believe that the one's that actually do the hard work - should choose what will be done with it. Donations to projects - are what they are, donations. Not investments. so risk, timeline etc are not relevant as I DONATED to possibility of new great technology that is happening right before our eyes. ( I don't have anything against if I will make mil. or 5 in the process )
Their generosity of people who actually did something in this project, in giving all the work to people should not be exploited even if there is a possibility of it, without them agree to that, which I havn't seen. Thats more or less my problem with all this voting and choosing what to do with someone else's work (not mine, I am too lazy to something like many others - I gave money).
And you correct, Is kind of wierd hybrid of democracy, but yet it has all the problems of it, you never know how proffesional or rational people's votes, but let's leave this subject and focus on Elastic.
Not sure what's your point actually, but there's discussion each time a decision is required. Then the community votes.
Many ideas were discussed and not all were voted - looks like voting takes places naturally for major decisions only.
As simple as that.
[Edit] There's no way everyone will agree for everything - that's why we vote.