Bitcoin core has a consensus mechanism and it is a very good one. What gets into the code is only that which has near unanimous agreement. which means proposa

Bitcoin core has a consensus mechanism and it is a very good one. What gets into the code is only that which has near unanimous agreement. which means proposals are discussed and altered and improved until everyone is happy. Believe it or not this is working well, and bitcoin is moving forward at a very rapid pace (especially given the difficulty of doing blockchain systems right)... people just don't realized it because few people read the release notes. Those who think bitcoin needs a consensus mechanism to determine its direction usually think that it doesn't have one and that some cabal is in control. That's not the case. Remember, Segwit and LN were from outside the community, the LN developers are mostly not part of core, and in fact one of the authors of the paper is an ethereum guy. They both got support in core quickly because they are good ideas. Both were announced in the fall of 2015 and cores support was in the code by May of 2016!