My town has a more formal way of doing the same thing now, applied to the whole city of several hundred thousand people. I guess I feel that the whole point of democracy is being missed. People will support decisions which they feel are being taken in their interests and on their behalf. Participating directly or through representatives is a great way to generate that feeling. Providing a disrespect for consensus does not destroy loyalty to the group.
People are better judges of their OWN interests than is any body else.
People tend to prosper when compulsion is minimized - when the parallel intelligence of all those individuals is allowed to mostly direct their own lives. People prefer government to be fairly stable and fairly predictable. People prefer for change to percolate from the bottom up and oppose it more when it is imposed from the top down. Accommodation and consensus win out over a series of bitterly contested divisions. If all the intervening levels between the individual and the total whole are to be swept away, then is the individual truly powerless in the face of tyranny.