When 59% of all tokens are owned by status dev...how and why does the community holders consensus matter?

SNT are not company shares. Even with 80 % in hands of the users you would not have any say in the development and roadmap. At best you'd have power to sell and cause a price drop but you'd need a large number of people with you to do so.

Based on the level shown on the slack board... Do you really want the majority power with the users??.? I don't

Well, regarding how development should proceed (I am a developer, so let others answer regarding other aspects of the question):

• We are an open source project, accepting code contributions:
  • we were giving SGTs for those during preparations to the Contribution Period
  • we have https://github.com/status-im/commiteth tool that allows to assign bounties to GitHub issues, so that contributors are awarded after the contribution (when SGTs are awarded no more)
• Even w/o any tokens, open source projects manage to be community driven, and I believe we will be able to do just fine
• Have some great feature in mind? Convince someone to implement it (and probably set a bounty), or contribute code yourself (and earn some bounty). We are quick to merge pull requests on GitHub.

I don't see how it's 59%. 20% - yes, 10% for contributors from community, but I don't think you can say they have total control over the project. 29% is for future stakeholders, so as I understand it will only be sold in future ICO, if there will ever be one.