As for all of the stuff about damage to the reputation. yea thats totally true and i mentioned it before. but its only true because of wrongheaded thinking. thinking that im trying to mitigate.
We are trying to reach consensus here. If devs propose this and miners refuse, devs lose credibility. Thus miners would not refuse even if the decision is against their interests unless they wanted to damage Monero. This is a perverted incentive, related to the fact that there is not one 51% attack that is not in the attacker's best interest, but that the attacker would make it in the others' best interest to not disagree. I'm not saying the devs are going to steal it all and leave (heck, I'm arguing they already have supreme power now). What I'm saying is that this misaligned incentive makes the vote result biased (or at least makes it not convincingly unbiased) and that leads to the reputation damage I mentioned.
Also, "wrongheaded thinking" is a loaded expression. It is patronizing and denotes that you don't really consider other points of view. If the best counter-argument is "that's wrong" maybe you need to engage a bit more in the conversation.
This distinction becomes blurry and troubling when Walmart issues your currency. Or other imperfect analogy of the kind. You conflate the dev team with a company again.
Like I said earlier, I see it as a measure of force majeure. The atomic solution. It is clearly better than the devs packing and taking a hike. But I want to fully explore the posibilities before signing up to this.
More transparency about the funds and their destination would definitely attract more donations. Make a list of 10-30 itemized atomic tasks, how much effort (XMR) they require, what are their expected time requirements, what is their urgency and their impact. An Excel sheet could work for now, and a Form for investors to indicate binding or nonbinding commitment for each of the projects.
Also, @smooth: crowdfunding also works really well with completely experimental games. Sure, they often flop, but not because they didn't get the money but because they were either unrealistic in their requirements (too low) or inefficient.