I don’t know how much it’s intended here to get into the long-grass of an actual governance change, but there was one bit that really stuck out to me:
There’s a lot about the Steering Council that is good and might only need minimal changes.
I think that’s right. The main problem I saw (first as Fellow and then as not-Fellow) was the voting mechanism acted to both remove the SC from discussion and shut down discussion, whereas ideally the SC needs to be involved, and (somehow) facilitate the exploration towards consensus. 
I’d try to make the formal vote a kind of last-line type thing, if we can work out how to phrase that.
I’d also ease the voting requirement at each step of a DEP’s progression. It proved painful. (A clear Let’s advance and then a difficult voting process to manage, taking at least a week minimum…)
Finally, a more organic vote should be available, even if we get to that stage: it seems reasonable to say “Exact wording A isn’t right, but can we tweak to…” without needing to scrap the vote and start again.
All of those are immediately long-grass, so we might want to just put those on the shelf for now. The essence of it is slightly less formal though. We’re a small org; we should leverage that.
However, the overall question of the Steering Council’s remit, and how it approaches technical leadership for the Django community, needs to be resolved.
I think we need the SC to be more involved. A couple of times we had a situation where we needed/wanted SC guidance but the response was (along the lines of) we can’t really speak without a formal vote being proposed — which didn’t help. All four members were/are experienced community members and their opinion is valuable, and can help guide the discussion.
I don’t think the SC can or should do everything or decide everything but if they can act as a focus to facilitate (or delegate facilitating) the discussions (beyond the small day-to-day, which runs itself) I think that would help us. I guess that ties into the word “Roadmap” that appeared in the post (and was one of the points not really implemented from DEP 10).
Thanks for posting, and getting the discussion started! 
Just wanted to say thank you to all the people who have been working behind the scenes to help our community navigate those challenges. It’s not all been great, but certainly I know a lot of our community members have a positive outlook on Django’s direction. As board members, we felt it was important to publicly state the challenges / threat, and our commitment to getting those resolved. But despite the tone, we feel great about the prospect of newly-elected Steering Council members resolving those issues.