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The developers have influence in that they are relied upon to a massive extent to keep bitcoin running.

As far as I can tell this sort of centralisation of influence is a common emergent property in most anarchic human systems.

Luckily if something particularly egregious occurs in this case, the community can easily fork the codebase and start a rival blockchain.

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"Homesteading the Noosphere" by Eric Raymond covers exactly this topic. He compares the open source software ownership to Lockean land titles. With Bitcoin, it's interesting since the project itself is a system of value and transactions.

http://catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/

Would they need to start a rival block chain? Or do they just need 51% of the current community to run their clients to take over the current block chain? (as suggested by a comment above)

Technically speaking, getting 51% of the community to switch is still creating a rival block chain. You don't even need 51%. As was the case in this incident, if you have incompatible nodes, the block chain would fork itself naturally.

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