Bitcoin - who do we believe?

I am told every day how wonderful Bitcoin is because it is decentralized and nobody controls your money. Your money cannot be frozen, it cannot be taken away from you, it doesn't have international borders and it is the way of the future. Now I like Bitcoin and I have invested in a few of them. I also consider myself pretty well read up on Bitcoin and I think I understand the risks and the concepts. However one thing really bugs me about all of this. Just as soon as we get some traction and Bitcoins starts to get some real value we are faced with a huge issue looming in August. Yes we have the scaling issue and the need to change the blocksize in order for it to cope with the huge increase in transaction volumes. Anyway regardless of whether I have this all right or not we are going to be faced with things like hard forks, soft forks and Segwits. Forget all the technicalities but what you all need to be aware of is that nobody seems to be able to get their act together and agree on the best way forward for Bitcoin. What does this mean for us as an investor? Well who the hell knows. We don't know if our Bitcoins are going to be protected in the exchanges, we don't know if our Bitcoins will split into 2. We don't know what will happen with each split and which will dominate and win. We do know of course that Bitcoin's value will take a major hit so we will all be screwed as investors with the traders making huge gains through the upcoming roller coaster.

Ok now enough of that crap. It seems to me that we all love Bitcoin because it is decentralized and nobody has central control of it. Well is that really the case? I read there are about 100 people who control Bitcoin and about 25 developers. I may be naive here but it seems to me that we are back in the same old boat. Instead of having greedy Banks or dodgy governments controlling our wealth we have a bunch of nerds instead. I really do not know who to trust. So why do a bunch of 25 computer geeks get to decide on what is best for Bitcoin. Where is their governance and controls? How do I know that we can trust what ever these people put into action? Someone please make sense of all of this for me. What do I do with my Bitcoins and who the hell do I trust? Finally why cant the code be locked down never to be touched again so nobody can control Bitcoin other that the forces of supply and demand!