Your post conjured similar thoughts I had specific to gaming/music (that’s my love and specialty). The thoughts below would correspond to the sub-dao idea OP laid out.
In terms of artistry (game deving, music, art, movie shorts), DAO funding could be best used to create the Ape version of Newgrounds. Many advantages IMHO:
$5.5 billion FDV without dedicated personnel building foundations. Currently, DAO is only capable of writing checks for others to build tall and fast. We need deep and wide ownership.
A site like Newgrounds for Apes serves as an artistic IP hub. Instead of writing checks for others to build disparate platforms, we get a lightning rod for all artistic ideas Ape and automatic IP percentage in any submission (could be stipulated in ToS). This is deep and wide ownership that also serves as a testing ground for ideas to more fully fund, ideas that may not be ready for Otherside (or the artists may not have Otherside land).
Lack of participation.
I think more participation comes when the UI for each sub dao gets prettier. Like, I wouldn’t expect many artists to dig down into these posts to argue the fine points of governance. But, they will submit their artwork to a site like Newgrounds for selfish reasons, and after they have invested in that pretty front end, eventually find their way to the governance backend to protect their investment of time and energy.
Providing an objective foundation will help drive meaningful discourse.
Creating a sub dao “frontend” with a ToS cuts down on duplicate proposals and uncorroborated ideas asking for big bank. As in, if you’re an artist, you can now easily show your participation in ApecoinDAO by just being a frequent submitter of art and commenting on others’ artwork, etc. Investors can make better decisions about risk of working with artists and teams, because the artists’ work is on display and its popularity can be easily gauged. Also, the artist’s participation in the community is much easier to discern.
ApeCoin DAO cannot accept revenue. A cost-center without resources, direction or ownership of economic upside is unsustainable.
Collecting IP gives the DAO time to figure out how to drive monetary value back to itself without losing out on real value.
I think a good example of this already happening comes in the Comm “subgenre” with the work from @Wizav.eth and others around Apeclub. This site and the sites being built around it form a great looking UI that communications-based apes can interact with easily and eventually find their way down into governance. It also focuses the comm “IP” for Apecoin — if you’re looking for a local club, you know to come here.
So in short, every subdao builds its own frontman UI to gather the people who are interested in that thing, then funnel those people through to core governance.
Thinking out loud, so some ideas may be better expressed when I think of some witty allegory/metaphor for them.