I have always felt that Bitcoin was doomed to this sort of fate, for the simple fact that the "specification" for the Bitcoin protocol was "whatever Satoshi's client does". The community repeatedly failed to encourage a diversity of implementations, and as a result they effectively ceded control of Bitcoin to the maintainers of the one and only implementation.
By the time independent implementations did begin to develop, it was too late to introduce diversity into the ecosystem.
>for the simple fact that the "specification" for the Bitcoin protocol was "whatever Satoshi's client does"
Fully agreed. The largest failure of the so-called "developers" (pretenders after Satoshi) of Bitcoin have failed to concentrate their efforts on understanding and specifying Satoshi's code.
The original Satoshi bitcoin implementation is a mess of Boost-y C++ that was clearly written by a bright guy who was steeped in mediocre C++ programming (probably on Windows). Studying the code and writing a proper specification is job number one. Adding random new features onto Bitcoin without first understanding the codebase is simply juvenile.
By the time independent implementations did begin to develop, it was too late to introduce diversity into the ecosystem.
The result is what we are now seeing.