"Especially considering they're taking a whopping 1.5mil for themselves in stake", still less than other tribes, and probably distributed slowly in years, so when it reaches t 1.5M it may be less than 10% of supply.

"To have that much control essentially centralizes all the power from the beginning." - not correct, just check before writing non-sense, I think the team printed dunno, maybe 5k for themselves, for now, ~ 4% of the total stake.
Palnet is much more centralized ;)