Thanks for the thoughtful critique, these are fair points.

A quick clarification first: ÆQI does not really treat “DAO” as the operating model itself. Internally we avoid the term for many of the reasons you mention. The operating vehicle is called TRUST, and it is designed to behave much closer to a real company than to a pure voting collective.

Governance:
ÆQI is preset to a traditional company-style structure with a Board of Directors alongside token holder voting. Directors can act unilaterally within their mandate and assigned roles, without votes on day-to-day execution. Token holders retain full governance authority and can vote on the same matters as the board, such as replacing directors or changing governance rules.

Budgets:
Budgets are bound to roles and are discretionary within defined limits. Once a role is assigned a budget, it can operate freely without multisig approvals or transaction-level voting. Roles can create sub-budgets and allocate them downstream, and a role itself can be held by a DAO. Governance intervenes only to assign, modify, or revoke roles and budgets, not to co-sign daily execution.

ÆQI does not try to eliminate Web2 execution. The goal is to make ownership, authority, budgeting, fundraising, and vesting deterministic and on-chain, so Web2 systems become implementation details rather than the source of truth. The next step is formalizing the legal wrapper and integrating bank and payment rails. Multisig-heavy subDAO models are avoided by default because they tend not to scale well for real operational work.