The reason why "DAOs" require traditional governance is because blockchains can only do strict global consensus

The assumption is you need a token to organise said governance, but this is not true. Indeed, some DAOs would be much better off following the worker cooperative or consumer cooperative model, rather than the public company model, with democratic voting and vetos for checks and balances (instead of being controlled by few whales, as it is for almost all crypto projects now - not just not decentralized, but very centralized. VCAOs, if you will, pun intended) 

Yeah, I get it, token gambling is crypto's big usecase, but it doesn't have to be. Building the best possible protocol to attract the most users might not be such a bad idea for the long term

voting based on contributions maybe the first line of thought one can follow. for example devs' # of commits resolving an issue or shipping a feature, content creators' useful posts, ...