Thanks for sharing this, @clowes.eth — your post sharpens a lot of what I was circling in my earlier reflections on SPP strategy. I agree with many of the core concerns you raise: delegate fatigue, lack of technical context, and the way incentives drift from mission-aligned coordination toward performative funding proposals.
Where your post pushes things forward (and I really appreciate this) is in offering a structural alternative: a smaller, technically proficient group making strategic assessments upstream, with the DAO retaining veto authority. That’s a meaningful shift—one that echoes what we see in protocol-level governance at places like Optimism or Arbitrum, where specialized working groups are empowered to act within clearly scoped domains.
In my write-up, I emphasized the need for clearer strategic coordination—a kind of pre-vote phase where the community agrees on what outcomes we’re optimizing for (e.g., resolver upgrades, governance infra, dweb utility, etc.). Your model could operationalize that direction: define a shared mission, then empower a team to assess which proposals best advance it.
That said, one point of contrast is how we envision accountability. I leaned toward an open strategic dialogue that includes ENS Labs, delegates, stewards, and contributors in defining yearly priorities. Your approach, if I’m reading it right, leans more toward expert-driven evaluations within a constrained mandate. Both are valid—maybe the real opportunity lies in combining the two: co-create the strategy in public, then resource a lean team to vet and execute it.
Thanks again for this—it’s the kind of discussion ENS needs more of. Happy to workshop this further if there’s appetite to turn it into a formal proposal.