You may have missed a couple of things. A good portion of the loudest critics of _the_ _process_ (not the result) ; I hesitate say the majority, because I haven't done the numbers; were in fact people in favor of the proposal itself, but who had the integrity to recognize that a result gained by such flawed means has little or no legitimacy.
Indeed; it was not a wonderfully useful polling of opinion. Count me in that group.
Thirdly, there never has in the past been *any* hierarchy in wikimedia, that is the beauty of it. And any attempt at empire building, now, or in the future, is doomed to fail. There is a governance structure, but that should be ring-fenced away from the community. What we have here is the governance structure trying to leap over the fence. We simply can't have that.
We have mini-empires at just about every level of the foundation and communities - at least on en.wiki. Those empires are pretty well entrenched by now that any differing view barely gets a look in.
What is needed here is not a prostrate leadership, but one which acknowledges what happened, and offers a crisp plain apology. That wouldn't repair the damage, but it sure would staunch the bleeding.
If only... as I recently commented at the London Wikimeet; for an organisation that is ostensibly at the bleeding edge of disseminating knowledge and openness we have a disappointingly standard/closed higher organisation. You can hardly tell it apart from the bazillions of other NFP's....
So: I wouldn't hold out hope.
Tom