Hi @Hamishcampbell and welcome 
I find it interesting, and revealing, that nobody here actually talked about what the thried was about Online governance - openwebgovernancebody - Gitea: Open Media Network
If you can look outside your world view… We are doing a funding proposal to do the simple well tested project/workflow (which we know dues not scale) and roll it out trying federation to scale. We know this works to extent , look at the “Fediverse ” as a living example of this approach working to scale small to bigger.
Yes there will be lots of “smoke” and we could do with some help keeping the project clear of this.
I think that our worldview probably crosses over more than you might think and that the worldview within CoTech is less standardised than you might think 
I think that @Graham has expertise on this from platform 6 but to me your post seems to be roundabout describing a multi-stakeholder co-op
Using instances as stakeholders makes sense on the surface, I’d like to highlight to you though that (on Mastodon) >99% of the instances are hosted in 5 countries, and some instances hold many more users than others (see comment above on centralisation in Mastodon)
I liked parts of your post on the tyranny of structurelessness e.g. rotating roles, but I do feel that you’ve missed out on many of the things I read here. One of my favourite things about the 11 steps is “break the power taboo”. I think you could consider Sociocracy as an alternative to the lottery system you outlined in your original post, I think it’s simpler, and via scalable circles it’s more direct/grassroots which seems to be what you’re aiming for when you talk about “getting out of the way of the humans”
I’m not sure I understand the labels “federation to scale” and “project smoke” concretely