It seems clear to me that the pricing mechanism is not readily understood by anyone, hence the ability for quantitative models to make money and yet still not be pure money printing machines (with the exception of HFT which does not claim to understand the general pricing mechanism, only short time span deviations from prior prices regardless of whether the prior prices are "wrong" or "right"). Further, the quantitative models I'm aware of price things on a relative basis : "given that we derive these general market parameters, things should be priced like f(x)", as opposed to "this company is worth X dollars". That fundamental analysts have jobs while still differing widely in their opinions suggests to me that the way to price things on an absolute basis is not well understood.
The underlying aggregation function may be simple, but we can't know that since its not transparent. My vote there goes towards not simple though.
Its most certainly democratic in some ways, though its unclear how votes are allocated. One per individual? One per trade? One per dollar? One per unit of influence?
I think the idea of crowdsourcing from a subset of the market could provide some edge, but think this is the wrong subset.