If the FSF had a billion dollar budget, they could copy the UI and infrastructure of Faceboot, include hooks that allowed people to run their own code/servers/etc, and then pump the resulting product LA^h^hSV-style until it caught on. There would be no need to criticize it for being somewhat centralized, because the option to run your own part would exist. And rather than powerlessly complaining about unilateral corporate decisions, even normal users could share software
fixes instead.
The FSF itself might specifically not be capable of this (due to an aesthetic formed from decades of waging trench war), but a generic Free software organization certainly would be. What's missing is the billion dollars to develop, refine, and endlessly promote this idea, because there is no scalable profit in actual Free software!
I don't think we're actually disagreeing on the above lead-in topic - we're just coming at this from wildly different paradigms. My comments are not trying to convince "billions" of people - I'm resigned to the fact that people will tend to choose the shiny promoted thing, even when the shininess itself is paid for by the harm being done to them!
But that does not mean that people who should know better (eg programmers) should find justification, or even escape scorn, for creating such things. Eroding users' ultimate control over their devices goes past the paternalism of protecting careless/ignorant users, and into the territory of malfeasance. Such things are against any basic sense of professional ethics - the same type of principle-agent violation as a sysadmin who creates a backdoor for their future self.
To bring this back to something concrete, look at the paradigm of control promulgated by contemporary bootloaders. Verifying running code is a worthwhile goal, but there is no reason this requires trust rooted in manufacturer-kept keys. Rooting the trust in symmetrical algorithms or user-loaded signing keys would accomplish the same exact goal while still preserving user freedom. And then the default scheme of only trusting code signed by the manufacturer would be implemented on top of that. But doing so would require a little more implementation complexity (giving up control inherently makes things harder), and be less profitable.
> There's literally decades of proof based on what's successful that we don’t have a firm grasp of how to adapt software freedom to Joe Random
My above points are essentially refuting your point here. The lack of mass-appeal Free software does not imply we don't know how to make it, as it can also be explained by simply not knowing how to fund it!
There are plenty of things in life that have rough edges and "average users" have ultimately learned to "not do that". Software is at an analogous stage to people putting water in the engine oil because of "one simple trick", but this does not justify welding the hood shut on all new cars!