Switzerland is generally looked upon as the closest a country can get to democratic these days and, from what I understand, more contentious topics there are re

Switzerland is generally looked upon as the closest a country can get to democratic these days and, from what I understand, more contentious topics there are resolved by referendums. That's something I'd agree with. Generally politicians should be there to deal with the boring details, not to make decisions about the foundational law like constitution, because the general population doesn't know any better. They're there to make governing scalable to the size of modern countries, not to take decisions away from us (at least in an idealistic view of the world). In some countries, when inevitably a party, which wouldn't win pair-wise elections with most of other parties, wins the elections nonetheless and forms a government, they proceed to make fundamental changes to the governance structures of the country, which the population does not support. That's not an edge-case of representational democracy, it's its MO. If I were a Debian Developer, I would like a vote in such fundamental topics, instead of needing to rely on someone somewhere representing me. This change is different than a change of say optimisation flags used when compiling Firefox. Bear in mind that there are distributions which aren't as democratic as Debian. So to use your argument: if a member doesn't like this structure, they may leave for another distro.