I think the tone of your post seems to imply that writing languages in some quasi-democratic (rather than oligarchic/dictatorial/elitist) way is or should be default. In fact, those assumptions are not the default (I can't think of any languages that are truly democratic, certainly most big ones aren't). Nor should it work like that imo, we don't design power plants by referendum. We put experts in a room, probably with a dictatorial decision maker and everyone else can whistle (or at least would really have to shout loud and be clearly right to be heard).

Also, if you're going for max language usage through design, how do you do that? By trying to perfect your design, so it's kind of an irrelevant motivator. Rich got a ton of clojure users (relative to his resources), he did that by having strong (reasoned) beliefs, not by opening the floor to a vote. Rich did /not/ say that he was only building Clojure only for his company, that's a very misleading statement that you've made.