In your example you point to the 'operators' of said two pools while ignoring the makeup of said pools which could number in the thousands instead of the minimal numbers which would exist with DPOS

Again, who are the "make up of said pools"? If you're talking about miners, the equivalent in DPOS is stakeholders (miners delegate their PoW vote, stakeholders delegate their stake vote). In both comparisons DPOS works out better. There is far higher stakeholder participation in Steem for example than the percentage of Bitcoin or Ethereum miners who contribute PoW. But neither miners nor stakeholders are actually involved in block production.

EOS doesn't exist now by choice. It could be started immediately using Graphene and have every change hard forked in, but that makes development slower so EOS will be matured somewhat prior to launch after the tokens on Ethereum have been frozen.