While this isn't about DAO, its true that recourse to courts undermines a central tenet of smart contracts, hence as you say DAO people would probably insist th

While this isn't about DAO, its true that recourse to courts undermines a central tenet of smart contracts, hence as you say DAO people would probably insist the code is the contract, until a problem occurs. In fact the DAO fork brings up another problem which applies to Bitcoin too - the developers (and miners if a POW coin) are de facto arbiters of the fate of millions, and if this sort of system were to gain widespread use, would have enormous power, in fact they already do even if you think the coins are overvalued. They decide if a fork is justified, a change will be adopted, or a tweak to algorithms to discourage certain behaviour. They become in some ways a parallel system of government/law without accountability. For all the pretence that people can just fork the project or choose another client, we've seen how hard that is to pull off, and how much influence is retained by the central developers of such a project with the recent Bitcoin Cash fracas.