Not that extreme.
Yes that extreme. In reality, the Ethereum Foundation can choose to develop any software they like, and as long as they control the network brand called “Ethereum,” they have both de jure and de facto control of which blockchain gets to be called “Ethereum.” The same way “Bitcoin Cash” can have 99% of the market cap and hash-power of Bitcoin, but still the Bitcoin Core group socially (if not legally) controls what network gets to be called “Bitcoin.”
Fixing the Parity Multisig bug costs zero in deployment and is fully “non-contentious,” as forks (or any form of expansion in the symbolic space) are always “non-contentious” by technical definition, since they do not impede the continuation of the previous blockchain.
The only point of “contention” is Market Fundamentalists getting angry at the idea that the Ethereum Foundation may choose to christen the Parity Multisig Fix as “Ethereum,” using their social and legal branding powers. This is like people complaining that they got banned from Internet forums with cries of “Oppression!”, when in fact the Internet is completely abundant of space where you can go instead. You can be censored in symbolic space, but you cannot be oppressed, since you cannot be squeezed into a corner like in purely physical, or physical-symbolic systems (and this is a quick model to try to show a moral angle; please don’t be literal about it and force me to expand this into five pages).
Market Fundamentalism is a bane for the social adoption of crypto. When the DAO fix was in, Bitcoin Maximalists were spilling poison in online bitcoin rags about how the Eth Foundation was having “phyrric hopes” of not being legally persecuted. I.e. they can have fantasies of volunteer developers being jailed for reverting symbolic thefts in an MMO. These people are insane and the Parity Multisig bug and the DAO hack are gifts in disguise, which allow us to identify them and drive them away from the social Ethereum network.
Right now Ethereum is in the early stage in which control over the protocol is de facto centralized
No. Protocols are not controlled, since they are just math objects and our present society is free enough that anyone can create their own math objects and post them on Github.
The Ethereum brand will always(*) be legally and socially centralized to whatever the Ethereum Foundation decides is the Ethereum network, and the majority of exchanges will always socially agree with what the Ethereum Foundation decides. Even if they completely cease doing any actual software development and just endorse other people’s implementations.
The Ethereum Brand is a social object, and that is what “controls” what miners and exchanges do. But that’s how basic leadership and naming works in our society. All those parties are free to ignore the Ethereum foundation and do their own thing.
(*) unless they give it up, of course.