I gather from this that you're against dPoS entirely, and that's a perfectly valid idea. The only problem with it is that the system is set up in such a way to incentivize people to buy the token. People seek some sort of empowerment, and in the world of dPoS, the stake is that power.

So outside of having a platform that can resist centralization and censorship, I'm not sure if that alone is enough to trigger people to buy tokens if they can't get extra influence over the distribution of network rewards.

If people are less inclined to buy the tokens for that reason, then people who mine/witness might be less inclined to run that software if the token demand doesn't meet a certain threshold. Specifically, one that gives the token, a sufficient enough value to bother with absorbing the expense of running the nodes and producing blocks.