While I don’t speak for the Harmony team, I’d like to offer my thoughts on this:
First, the grants are an additional incentive to build - not getting one does not stop you from building on Harmony. It also doesn’t preclude you from applying again in the future, when you are bigger/have proven the model.
Second, you mentioned seeing grants approved for projects that have amounted to nothing or were left behind – to me, that is an argument in favor of more strict review and acceptance criteria of future grant proposals, not a reason to remain with the previous level of review. As such, that would also necessarily mean their review of your proposal should be tougher.
Third, DAO funding proposals are fundamentally different from other project proposals. Many funded ones are regional DAOs or Taking a look at one of the other community projects that submitted a DAO proposal which was approved, TokenJenny (ref: TokenJenny DAO - Creating DAOs for EveryONE - #15 by lij), you can see that they had already launched their project, gotten some traction, and started to decentralize it. Many projects (particularly ones with their own tokens) do not need to start off as a DAO and in fact, practically speaking, do not operate as a DAO. Decentralizing the governance to the community requires, in my opinion, that there BE an active community established. Transitioning to a DAO structure can be a gradual/progressive process.
Good luck with Cerebral Gaming though!