The vision behind crypto is more decentralized than the actual currency is. Some may applaud the SEC stepping in to combat shady ICO's, others see it as overreaching death throes by an increasingly anxious dinosaur.

Bitcoin was set up to disproportionally reward the early adopters. The early adopters were cyberpunks, cryptography enthusiasts, and darknet merchants. Since we can only speculate about the inventor(s), the motivation can range from a US-hostile government wanting to loosen the grip the US has on fiat and digital currency, to Libertarian Anarchists wanting to switch trust from bank-bailing-out governments to technology.

It seems one goal "to protect Bitcoin from the select few" is already close to impossible, as Bitcoin shows a highly skewed power distribution (a select few has thousands of Bitcoin).