if the protocol were to change, clients and relays would have to also be willing to adopt the change, almost if not all of which are open-source and easily fork

if the protocol were to change, clients and relays would have to also be willing to adopt the change, almost if not all of which are open-source and easily forked if a large population did not care to pull in those changes. Sure there's always someone guiding the direction, but I don't know how much better you can get than that.