Athens was a democracy, but I'm guessing you likely would not have approved of it because it was anything but pluralistic.

You're talking about an ideological ideal, where the grassroots is as heard as the clergy. A laudable goal, but democracy is a mechanism. You use democracy to get to that ideal. But you may need more than simple democracy. You may need a rule separating church from state to stop what happened in the Commonwealth. Completely non-democratic, because you're precluding people from voting for certain people, but it's protecting pluralism, and pluralist thoughts and ideas. Of course that rule does you no good if people just ignore said rules, but that's another discussion.

I don’t think you’ve established that the Massachusetts Bay colony had a system that prevented change that wasn’t condoned by the existing rulers. I would argue it had a system of enforced social consensus that could change (and did change) as the consensus changed.

“Dictators” come in two varieties. One is someone like Putin, who enforces policies the majority may or may not support. But another is someone like Lee Kuan Yew, who presides over a consensus-oriented society that keeps getting elected because the consensus supports the direction of the country. The latter is still a democracy, and in a way a more perfect democracy. The authoritarian element serves not to oppress the majority, but to overcome the heckler’s veto and allow the government to actually do what the majority wants.

And, of course, the structure of power in the Massachusetts bay colony was much more distributed and democratic than Singapore. It was a sort of collective authoritarianism rather than top down authoritarianism.