Dear Always,
What you are talking about is only a sliver of the national or international leadership. Many (maybe even most) of the big halachic controversies came from an individual with an agenda that kept on pushing until he got acceptance among a large amount of the poskim.
PS Didn’t Rav Soloveitchik write about this? Something like that halacha is not a democratic process, and therefore it has completely different safeguards that get corrupted by a preference for outside influence.