The tezos protocal has a major innovation over others: formal governance by the owners of the tokens. It is also proof of stake from the beginning. In general they have made a lot of smart design decisions as documented in their publications going back several years.
They have been slow to launch though. While they might have had a lead on Ether, it is now to be seen how the market reacts to their sale.
You mean the innovation that 50% can trivially rewrite history, or something else?
(imo 80% is more than enough to prevent shenanigans -- in most contexts anything even slightly controversial cannot get near 80% support. And in this case, the voting is weighted by stake, and the market value of the Tez would presumably decrease if shenanigans were pulled; Tez-holders would probably be reluctant to do something that is both wrong and also would clearly decrease the value of their holdings. In fact i think the threshold for amendment should be lower than 80%; i might chose 67% if it were up to me)
If they were old, there would be one, obvious, correct design to follow. However, no one knows precisely what the right formula is yet. This has led to a situation where projects either stagnate -- Bitcoin as network has been unable to integrate important innovations despite the incredible talent of the people working on it -- or build a strong coupling to a central organization, which can threaten their decentralized nature.
How do you design a decentralized protocol that can keep up to date with innovation in this space and yet remain decentralized? That's the problem the governance model is trying to solve.