I think Culture-style benign dictatorship is a better system than democracy, but hadn't been practised yet. As currently practised, democracy tends towards bureaucracy and short-term thinking (projects small enough to fit in a term).
Not to mention that it can devolve into something that's more of a democracy in name only.
Take the upcoming US elections where the choices are, on one hand, a blowhard who wants to build a massive wall to keep out Mexican immigrants, and on the other a corrupt-to-the-core corporate puppet.
This isn't much of a real democracy when parties become so big that more competent people have no chance of running for office without the support of said parties.