1. It's a fierce competition and the devs public profile can help the coin succeed.
How ? Have you ever seen Satoshi's or gmaxwell's public profile before you bought bitcoin ? Did you even cared who they were ? If not then,why now ?
At the point I first heard of Bitcoin, Mt Gox has already happened. At that point it didn't matter anymore who made Bitcoin.
Also, just imagine the early days of Bitcoin. Would you have bought it for fiat? Let's say.. for 5$ one BTC? How about 50$ a BTC in 2009?
Now think that a public figure, somebody known to be a brilliant mathematician and economist and cryptographer and programmer release this Bitcoin thing in 2009, making publicity for it and telling that it's his project and these are the benefits. Wouldn't be a better chance you'd invest?
3. Here's another problem. Asking for KYC when getting to fiat and banks is a requirement from the banks and not much to do. But at start most exchanges were crypto-crypto (altcoin exchanges) and all was great. Nowadays all go in the direction of diversifying towards fiat and that means that they ask for KYC. That happened with Polo, I expect the same with Bittrex.
That is happening because people are using them extensively and by people I mean noobs who have no idea what's what.These are not even crypto-heads or people enthusiastic about bitcoin,they're just traders looking to make money by centralising the system.
Yes, I know that this is the modern era gold rush and many come without knowing anything, nor caring. Exchanges are businesses. At start they may have been owned by enthusiasts, but nowadays they got bought by bigger businesses, thus, indeed, centralization.
But, again, the same goes with fiat and crypto alike. You can use banks and services and that means they know everything about you, or you can use directly the coin or the paper and you are hidden.
It gets harder day by day to achieve that, I know that too, but it can still be done.
But at the end, the idea is to not help bad people hurt us. I know the implementation (to require everybody's personal data) is plain stupid, but it's all we have for now. All we can do is to try to go and vote for smarter people next time...