This isn’t the first time I have proposed this, but the pushback leads me to believe the owners do not want to relinquish power to the users. Lemmy it seems, is a community for owners. The interests of instance owners and their delegates come first.

That is true because admins pay for the servers and are legally responsible for the content they host. However anyone can quite easily become an admin, the hosting cost for a single user instance is very low.