Stake leasing (centralization) isn't required in NXT's PoS.
Of course it's required. That's like claiming pool mining in Bitcoin isn't required. It's only not required when the coin price is low per unit and it's being used for virtually nothing, with no widespread distribution or demand (i.e. now). Hey guys! I'm not centralized because it's possible to solo mine Bitcoin if I spend $10 million dollars!
With widespread adoption, you would need tons of cash to solo stake. Due to the way transparent forging would work, you would most likely not be able to allow hundreds of thousands of people to stake either. You would probably need to set a minimum stake amount required to be allowed in at all, while culling off all the others. In this manner you've recreated DPoS except with no sybil protection. With transparent forging, the need to pool your stake (delegated voting) increases even more as well.
Virtually
everything that you complain about for Bitshares claiming it's centralized also applies to NXT and Bitcoin. They are far more similar than not. The main difference is, DPoS starts off with the acknowledgement that PoW and PoS both use delegation and engineers the voting process to do so in the protocol itself. The other two are using a more Rube Goldberg approach to reach the same destination of delegation.
Here's your own hero, "come-from-beyond", telling you NXT isn't going to fit your definition of "decentralized" so you better sell off your NXT now:
See also:
The Bitcoin consensus mechanism is incorrectly labeled Proof of Workhttps://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-bitcoin-consensus-mechanism-is-incorrectly-labeled-proof-of-work-1176835Satoshi didn't solve the Byzantine generals problemhttps://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/satoshi-didnt-solve-the-byzantine-generals-problem-1183043I dislike DPOS because of the necessity for people to vote on delegates. Now this may work perfectly fine in such an enclosed envirement that we're in right now where the userbase is very small but I doubt it'll work very well if any DPOS ever hit's mainstream.
DPoS actually scales to world reserve currency better than any other consensus mechanism. The first transition for DPoS voting would be people like exchange owners and businesses that utilize the platform would run as delegates to make sure the network they depend on is secure. From there, the actors would just keep scaling larger until you had every nation state as a delegate. Some people would think this sounds like a bad thing, but unless every nation was colluding with each other, it would get rid of fractional reserve banking at the very least, which is the real root of all problems.