My opinion is that the DAO should run its own grants program separate from what the foundation does. We should give the foundation freedom to run a grants program of its own.
Perhaps the foundation should step in to help drive ideas forward, but the DAO needs to own its own processes or else voter apathy will happen. The best thing the DAO can do is create a grants framework that is so engaging, even to small holders, that people are buying ARB to participate in governing the DAO grants program.
I’d rather see a plurality of mechanisms as discussed here: Grants Funding Framework Discussion - How To Excel at Being a DAO
I’ve been thinking about this lately. A north star could be total active developers in the Arbitrum ecosystem as defined by the Electric Capital Developer Report. However, this would need a counter metric to ensure we aren’t sacrificing quality. Therefore, we could score the GitHub of the projects and find a quality metric to maintain.