I agree. The concept of self-governing is only marketable to those few users who like to "check under the hood" to see how the magic is achieved and if there are any flaws.
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If my math is right, Dash's internal governance ecosystem is only about 1% of Dash's annual supply--and that's going to decrease over time as the currency matures. I tend to agree with tok and others that when too much effort is seen being put on developing Dash's self-funded/community-directed management system, it could send the wrong message because the goal is to get the outside economy to use Dash.
I see where you're coming from but I have to disagree on a couple of points.
First, since the budget funds are 10% of the block reward, and the entire block reward goes down approx. 7% each year, the budget funding will not make up a decreasing percentage of Dash's annual supply. They scale together. However, the budget funding will make up a decreasing percentage of Dash's total emission.
Second, I think that the budget funding is incredibly important. AFAIK, we are the only currency that can pay for our own development without relying on donations (which are sparse and intermittent) or centralized funding (organizations like Blockstream and MIT that play such a large role in Bitcoin development). By being self-funding, we ensure that we aren't controlled by special interests. Not only that, but we ensure continued development. All of our developers are great people, IMO, but they all ultimately want some sort of remuneration for their work. Some of that can come from asset appreciation, but that could take many years. By paying our developers a salary, albeit currently a small one, we can incentivize them to stick around, and even get new ones to join us.
Think about the potential of self-funding our software and infrastructure development. Other coins have to hope that some exchange will eventually spend the money to integrate them. We have the money to pay for that work ourselves, thus getting us on more exchanges faster. Other coins have to wait and hope somebody takes a chance and spends the money to develop a debit card. We can fund that development and make it happen much faster.
Consider that Bitcoin, if it had the same budget funding that we do (10% of each block reward), would have $19.4 million that they could pay developers, use to jump-start infrastructure projects, use on PR and marketing, etc. Nearly twenty million dollars in budget funds available for their use! (Of course, there will be the halving soon, so it would decrease then.)
Now put it a different way. Dash has a much different emission rate, so imagine that Dash had the same marketcap as Bitcoin. The price of Dash would be $1100, meaning that we'd have roughly $100 million in annual budget funding! (Declining 7% per year if price remains stable.)* This is an enormous amount of money by anybody's standards! And all of it would go toward making Dash better in some way! When you look at it that way, spending some time to safeguard potentially millions of dollars in future funding seems wise.
Third, a big part of what Evan is working on with the "new budget system" is less about budget money and more about governance. Bitcoin's biggest problem isn't blocksize and backlogged tx's; Bitcoin's biggest problem is governance. If Bitcoin had a decently-designed governance system, they could have arrived at consensus long ago. People forget, but the blocksize debate was occurring (in a much more muted form) back in December 2013 when I first got involved in crypto.
Bitcoin's development team is fragmented and their entire blockchain is controlled by the miners, who have greater incentive to dump (to pay bills) than hold. Consequently, the entire Bitcoin economy is dictated by a handful of people (pool operators and large miners) in China (cheap electricity and labor) whose interests are not aligned with the rest of the userbase (more likely to sell than to hold or buy).
Dash has fixed one part of the governance problem, since masternodes are in control of the network (not miners), and since masternodes have a self-enforcing voting method (at least for budget funds). While Evan could certainly pay out of pocket to fly to a conference somewhere, and the masternodes can't prevent it, they can keep him from receiving reimbursement. This serves as a disincentive to behave in a way that the masternodes don't like. In the same way, we can't force a developer to work on a certain thing, but we can cut of his funding if he doesn't. Anybody who has read
Freakanomics realizes that money is a powerful factor in nearly all things. The budget system (via the masternodes) controls that money, and thus governance.
Not only that, but a lot of what Evan is doing, and what people lump under "the new budget system" has little to do with money and lots to do with power/governance/control.
*Math:
Approx.: ((576 blocks per day * 365 days per year) * (4.3 block reward * 0.1 budget percentage)) * $1100 = $99,443,520
