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This idea seems pretty central to the argument, but I don't think you've considered trade-offs. As you point out, there are large sums of money at stake. And, as you've pointed out, people respond to incentives.
Accepting your position: In the current world, just being a member of the EA community doesn't give people any particular incentive over how money is spent. Leadership might read your posts, or not. They'd feel no special need to listen. As a consequence of these incentives, people don't join the EA community for influence. They'd join for some other reason, like a love of the cause.
This creates the situation you (reasonably) see as unjust. The community is full of people who are sincerely invested in the cause, and the community's leadership feels empowered to ignore them.
It sounds like you'd prefer that leadership change their approach. They should have legible feedback loops, with clear ways that people can reach them. They should commit to replying to comments. And they should give non-trivial weight to the consensus of the community. But these policies would change people's incentives. Now, participating in the community -- and being able to sway community opinion -- would enable people to shape how large amounts of money are being spent.
This would change the composition of the community. There'd be people who are sincerely invested in the cause. But also there'd be people who'd recognize that participating in EA-Community and trying to sway the consensus of the (non-leadership portion of) the EA-Community is a way to direct money to their preferred cause.
When you change these incentives, I think you'd attract and motivate "lobbyists". Lobbying isn't intrinsically bad; sometimes the advocates of a position have facts on their side and can sway a community by reason and good argument. Other times, lobbying amounts to rabble-rousing, where you try to get a bunch of people really angry at an organization's leadership, in hopes of causing the organization enough pain that they'll give in to your demands so you go away.
I'm not saying that either approach is intrinsically correct, and if your argument is just that "The current, top-down model has costs" then I agree. But I think the "listen to your community" model - which is more common in the world - also has some major costs. My personal feeling is that, in-as-far as EA wants to remain a coherent thing, and not just become like any other grant-making agency (eg. NHS, or even the US Government) then it can only do so in-as-far as it can keep a barrier for entry. We know what happens when the general public gets a say in charity. For better or worse, that's just the bulk of public charities.
The alternative is not only Open Philanthropy/the NHS/the government listening to people. It's the people organizing themselves civically, independently, and more unconstrainedly. For this you don't need to have barriers to entry of the kinds you are thinking of, you need for the community to not have atrophied a muscle of organizing things of its own initiative, using its own resources, with its own labour. As an example, consider the Informal Anarchist Federation.
I'm arguing on the margin. Yes, the current top model has costs, and I think that on reflection these are much higher than when EA is advertising itself, which should lead to other alternatives looking better on the margin. I'm saying that, if one reflects on these dynamics, for some fraction of people who buy deeply into EA, the costs will have been too high. Maybe the trouble is that I'm not arguing "EA as a whole should", but rather at the level of individuals.
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