I think my broader point stands, though: despite engineering efforts towards decentralization, market forces push Bitcoin towards centralization (due to mining pools and due to consolidation amongst manufacturers of mining hardware).

The most important counterbalance to this is not in the Bitcoin protocol, but also an economic one: large mining operations have an interest in keeping up (at least the perception of) decentralization, because that's why people like Bitcoin.

At that point however, you're back to a system where the safeguards are not of a technical nature at all. Maybe Satoshi foresaw that to some degree, but apparently he wasn't able to engineer around it.